I’ve read about pine pitch being used to make healing salves, but I just didn’t pursue making any because I already had other herbs on hand that would do the same job and didn’t require gathering and dealing with an extremely sticky substance. However, over the past few months I’ve also come across or been reminded of other uses for pine pitch that merit some attention.
First off, pine sap, pitch, and resin/rosin are all basically the same substance, just with varying degrees of runniness. Sap is fairly liquid and very sticky. Pitch is much less runny, but still soft and sticky. Resin, the hardened, dry pitch, is brittle and much less sticky. The terms are often used interchangeably; the substance is used the same. If you don’t have pine trees near you, pine resin seems to be available at a fairly reasonable price on Etsy.
Pine pitch is used not only to make a natural healing salve, it also is a pretty popular component to making reusable food wrap, an idea that got me to pursue researching more about pine pitch. It was the original hot glue, and it’s been used for centuries (if not millennia) for waterproofing. All of these applications may become important to us in the future and will be covered in individual posts. Today’s article focuses on processing the pine pitch.
According to the gurus who make and sell pine pitch salve, apparently the best, most healing, pine pitch is pinion pine pitch. As luck would have it, there are hundreds of pinion pine trees just beyond our property. It took a few weeks to psych myself up for the job. I didn’t want to go out when it was hot, after all. And I was too busy in the morning and late afternoons. And I knew it would be a messy job. And it was all uphill.
But the weather forecasters say the temperatures are dropping 15 degrees on Thursday and then another 15 degrees on Sunday. So I had to just bite the bullet. I got a prescription pill bottle from the trash to collect the pine pitch and headed out the door and up the hill.
The first tree, the most perfectly Christmas-tree-shaped pinon I have ever seen, had not a drop of sap. Neither did the second. The third had some, but not much. After about a dozen trees, I’d collected maybe half a teaspoon of pitch. This was clearly not a quick trip.
Then I hit a pretty good tree and got maybe a whole 2 teaspoons, using the edge of the pill bottle to scrape, or sometimes the bottle cap. It’s definitely sticky stuff. But fortunately, there weren’t too many bugs, except for a clearly hopelessly lost honeybee. I’m quite sure there were no flowers or hives for miles.
A few more trees with next to nothing, and then I finally hit the motherlode. There had to be a couple tablespoons of sap. But it was a little out of reach, so I broke off a small tree branch and used that to scrape the pitch off the higher branches and trunk. All the while I had been keeping my eyes peeled for some clean sap that I could try chewing. You know, like the Indians did. And I found a little bit and popped it in my mouth.
There’s a reason why Indians were skinny and why we prep good food. That pinion pine pitch tasted just like turpentine smells. Even after brushing my teeth and eating two freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, I still taste it.
Also, do not wear good clothes while out collecting pine pitch. It will get on your clothes and possibly ruin them. However, hand sanitizer has been shown to take pitch out of clothes and off skin. As a bonus, it will also indicate exactly where the needles and branches scratched you so that you can wash those areas particularly well. ;)
In other words, for best results and the least possible pain and damage, wear old clothes with long sleeves, pants, and perhaps even some gloves.
To refine pine pitch, you’ll need a double boiler with water in both the bottom and the top pot. Put all the pitch and sap into an empty, clean can and set it in the top of the double boiler with water around it. (Most people use soup cans; I don’t buy soup so I opened up a can of mandarin oranges and used that.) Over medium-high heat, soften the pitch in the can. This may take up to an hour.
In the meantime, prepare another clean, empty can with a square of loosely woven cotton (I used an old flour sack towel) secured over the top of the can with a rubber band. Arrange it so that the cotton square is cup-shaped to hold all the softened pitch, at least a few tablespoons’ worth. Pour or scoop the softened pitch into the cotton-topped can. Set this can in another pan in the oven and set the oven to 250°F. In 30-60 minutes the pitch should be completely liquefied and drained into the can, leaving the bits of bark and other debris in the cotton above. (This pitch-coated debris makes an excellent fire-starter.)
This refined pine pitch is now ready to be combined with other items for your intended purposes.
Links to related posts:
11.2.20
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