Stock up on Natural Vitamin C – Limes and Lemons

Wherein I rub in the fact that you’d best not catch the sniffles right now, while YOU KNOW WHAT is “raging”. And I explain the need for holistic immune support rather than just isolated Vitamin C, and how limes and lemons can repair the body’s ability to absorb and make nutrients we need, from whatever is our basic diet. I also describe six of the easiest methods to preserve limes for your own medicinal needs, and demonstrate with pics, the second easiest of them.

Ed, I usually don’t like to say stuff that’s been said before. But I simply have to. Because it’s SO important right now.

Anyone coming down with anything that mimics the seasonal flu – or coughing or a chest infection or even a sore throat, is in danger of being diagnosed with YOU KNOW WHAT.

One needn’t go through the horrors of the suspicion of YOU KNOW WHAT.

The store bought Vitamin C pills never really worked for me, and I suspect intelligent healthy bodies don’t really care for “dead” vitamin c like that. Vitamin C is an isolated substance from an eco system – the eco system being fruits like limes and lemons and berries.  The entire eco system is required for a holistic lift-up of the immune system.

Elder berries, Rosehips, Maritime Pine Bark are awesome concentrations of Vitamin C in the entire immunity building eco system. But not everyone is able to get them in times like this with half of stores being shut down and online sellers not being able to post things out. (Me for example – still can’t post treatments out.)

But here’s one really easy thing to do, and an extremely powerful medicine that can be made at home so very easily.

You just need to get about half a kg of limes or lemons and preserve them some way. Then you have a little of them every day as a preventative to coughs, colds etc. Or you have a lot of them if you begin to fall ill. It works like a charm, Ed.

I could hardly list the benefits of limes and lemons in this post. But I’ll just mention this one thing – It’s a commonly known thing that pregnant women taking Vitamin C have demonstrated such a remarkable rate of wellness compared to those not getting enough Vitamin C. The developing baby at every stage needs a whole lot of nutrients and Vit. C helps the body absorb calcium (for the bones) and so many other needs.

The energy of limes and lemons is simply energy generation. Whatever you need energy for in the body, it’ll be helped by fresh energy moving about. 

In the old days, the few limes or lemons in the pockets of a prisoner being put on a ship to the colonies meant the difference between life and death as infections of all kinds were rife on the ships. Infections like scurvy that left their effect for generations.

So, what you need to remember is, whatever you need, the lime will either provide it or help your body absorb that from your food. 

This modern “nutrition” drama about how one has to eat a million different things from various continents to stay healthy is just not commonsense.

There was this Chinese prison camp in the 50s or 60s up in the Himalayas in a dry arid place. Only peas could grow in that place. So the entire diet of about 700 men was peas for breakfast, peas for lunch and peas for dinner. They had peas all the time for years and years. They were as healthy as anyone else.

Whole populations of our ancestors lived on potatoes, meat, the odd cereal like barley, the odd vegetable, and some kind of fat.

Our bodies MAKE our own nutrients. We don’t need to take in everything in its final form. This information is very damaging to those who want to sell you something for every little thing.

The big part of nutritional deficiency is not about not getting enough of something, but not being able to absorb or make, or work with what’s already available.

We need to exercise our bodies in making our own substances , and absorbing and properly digesting our food.

Limes and lemons are amazing medicine for all nutritional deficiencies because they get the body’s digestive abilities, and nutrient manufacturing abilities going. 

Getting back to the half a kg of limes – there are several ways to preserve them in a way you can use them regularly or use them as medicine.

6 WAYS TO PRESERVE LIMES AND LEMONS

Method 1 – Freeze the Juice

One easy way it to juice them, and freeze the juice into ice cubes, then transfer them into bags in the freezer. I find this good for putting in drinks but I’ve never had a freezer big enough to accommodate all my projects, and I find something frozen just doesn’t have the same effect as the fresh or preserved otherwise.

Method 2 – Extract the fruit into alcohol ie. make a tincture

Apparently it’s an amazing explosion of flavor. You use just the lime peels, soak them in Everclear or any alcohol of your choice. Apparently it only takes an hour in Everclear. I’d go for Brandy though as that’s the traditional medicine for colds anyway. Keep the peel pieces in till you feel they’ve transferred their nutrients into the Brandy.

Now you have a potent medicine – a few drops of which every few hours would be all the medicine you’d need.

Method 3 – Dry them black in the oven 

This is something  I would love to try. It’s so exciting to look at – makes you think of pirates on the high seas. You put limes in the oven on a tray on minimum for about two days till they’re dehydrated black. Then you powder them, or keep them whole somewhere in a dark place and add it to food, or take it as medicine. I can see that being an amazing medicine for all things digestive related.

You can see the exciting pictures I saw at this link: DIY Black Limes

Method 4 – Pickle them Mediterranean Style 

In this method you make incisions into whole limes or lemons and pack them with salt and put them in a jar for a month. Then you just scoop out the pith in the middle of the lemons and keep the rind. That’s it. Apparently it’s something that if you taste once, you’ll never want to be without. I simply don’t have enough jars to try this right now, or I would.

Here’s an article with pics and details: Meditteranean Style Preserved Lemons

Method 5 – Pickle them Indian Style

This one is more of a spicy but healthy addition to your diet, like a sauce you keep on your table, so you have a little everyday.  It involves cutting up limes, then keeping them out in the sun and then making a sot of preservable curry out of them.

It seems daunting – the whole process, but I think it might be worth it, because then you’ll have both a medicine, and something to eat crackers with and that sort of thing.

Here’s one recipe – Lime Pickle

Method 6 – Preserve them in Brine 

This is the one I find the easiest to make and keep and use. The fact that it’s a probiotic along with being a lime preserve takes it as a medicine to a whole other level. All that has to be done, is to dry the limes out a bit – brown them, ie and then submerge them in brine – which is salt water – in a jar. You keep it in a dark place for a month. That’s it.

Here’s an article that describes it in detail – Chinese Preserved Limes.

And here’s my roughshod method of preserving limes (and everything else for that matter) just to show you how easy  it is.

STEP 1 – TURN ON THE MUSIC

If you skip this step, you will regret it. If you don’t turn on the music, you’ll have to sing the whole time.

STEP 2 – PUT THE LIMES ON A TRAY AND SET THEM ON A WINDOW SILL  IN THE SUN

These were all green to start with. But two days of maybe 3-4 hours of partial sunlight got the skins on the hard side which is what we want.

STEP 3 – PUT THE LIMES IN A JAR AND COVER FULLY WITH WATER

STEP 4 – POUR THE WATER FROM THE JAR OUT INTO ANY EMPTY VESSEL AROUND

I know what you’re thinking Ed. If you had my photography skills, the things you could’ve achieved. The places you could’ve gone…

STEP 5 – MIX TWO TABLESPOONS OF SEA SALT OR ROCK SALT INTO THE WATER

I thought you’d really appreciate some help with a picture at this point in the recipe.

STEP 6 – NOW POUR THE SALT WATER BACK INTO THE JAR COVERING THE LIMES

It reminds me of cell reproduction and that’s exactly what it does too.

STEP 7 – COVER THE JAR AND SAY THREE HAIL MARYS AND FOUR HALLELUJAHS

I replace this bit by holding up the jar to Mothman on the wall. Mothman’s been meeting religious needs in the kitchen since I found out that he chills out around the winding country roads of West Virginia.

Yeah, but you might like to stick with the Hail Mary and Hallelujahs, as a beginner, to be on the safe side.

After a month in the back of a cupboard, during which you’ll have to open it now and then to let gas escape, you take out a lime, cut it open and put it into drinks, food, whatever. It gets squishy and is full of all the good bacteria the gut (and respiratory system) need.

Conclusion

I have to state here, lest you think I don’t really care about you, that the one situation in which you might not consider it a good idea to have this lime preserve, is after you have had a non-smoked version of cannabis, such as high THC Rick Simpson oil. It seems to lessen the trippy effects of the THC.

It is however, even then an awesome medicine because the THC can do its thing without you going through very much of a crazy trip.

In cases where children and pregnant women and pets are on medical cannabis with high THC, this offers a wonderful way to get all the benefits of THC (which you don’t get with CBD or Hemp extract) without having too much of a trip.

Immunity isn’t all about Vitamin C. It’s not that simple. There are lot of specialized herbs to help with particular conditions in amazing robust ways.

The most important aspect of immunity though, is the will to live. Our will to live becomes stronger when we find pleasure and joy in life. Finding deep personal happiness is the best way to have a healthy immune system. Releasing grief and sorrow are  a vital part of healing holistically.