A Practical Guide To Stinging Nettles
Nettle roots go deep. Really deep. You never know how deep. They’re also rhizomic, which means they sprout long, tough underground stems - rhizomes - that seed new plants, and is the reason that they’re often found in clumps.
This makes them very difficult to eradicate. Digging up a single plant requires great strength, to wrench the tangle of roots from the earth. Even then, the rhizomes will have seeded a host of tiny offshoots, and the deeper roots will be beyond the reach of your spade. You will have to pull them until they break, and hope the broken sections don’t regenerate, which they probably will.
Nettles come from everywhere. Seeds blow in, rhizomes spread from neighbouring plots, and once they take hold, they stay. It’s Nature’s way, nowhere is immune from them. Once they establish themselves; they drag pain to the surface; from hidden, inaccessible places one never even knew existed
Being basically impossible to remove, Urtica Dioica therefore demands your acquiescence. It is only once you accept this, that you can effectively deal with it. And if you know how to deal with it, it needn’t be a problem.
Only the tips of the serrated edges of the leaves sting. Run a nettle leaf through your clenched fist from stem to tip, and you will not be stung. Do the same with the leaf in reverse and you will. A lot. This is also true for an entire plant. Cut one off at the root, run it entirely through your hand from said root and you will not be stung once.
In some duels in centuries past, nettles were often substituted for swords. When the leaf tips pierce the skin they inject a cocktail of chemicals: acetylcholine, histamine, serotonin, and formic acid. Their deep roots make them such fine chemical production units. They retrieve nutrients from the subsoil leached beyond the reach of other plants.
Which is great, because it means that nutrient rich nettles make both excellent food and compost. Tea, cheese, pesto: all of these and more can be made with nettles. Also, scythe off some stems, chuck them in a vat of water for a year, and you’ll end up with a liquid fertiliser rich in magnesium, sulphur and iron.
Once you have nettles, you’ll never lose them. They are their own abiding legacy. I dug some up at my allotment today, but the roots extended into regions I couldn’t reach. They’ll be back. But this isn’t necessarily bad. Pain endures; I have to live with my nettles, you have to live with yours. That’s life. It has to be said, I have to take some responsibility for my clump, some of them anyway. I have been an ignorant gardener at times, stabbing around blindly with an untrained fork. Others, though, the wind blew in, and I can’t do anything about them. Bear them, is all.
Nature does some queer shit to you man. Fuck, does it.