A Different Type of Sting!

As I cultivated my rows of young lime trees yesterday with my little tractor I looked down with satisfaction as the rototiller ground the carpet of green weeds in front of me into the trail of soft fluffy earth rolling away behind me. If the weeds continued to grow they’d use up the subsoil moisture that I want to be available for the limes. We use drip irrigation to water the citrus as economically as we can and there’s a drip emitter at the base of every tree, so I’ll still have to hand weed around the base of the trees where I can’t reach with the tiller so that they don’t grow thick and rank. I don’t need a thatch of weeds providing a nice, fresh, green hiding place for slugs and snails because they can do so much damage to citrus. The weeds had to go, but I was happy to see that there are so many stinging nettles in my orchard.

Down in the canyon below my home and my little citrus orchard there’s a swampy wetlands full of ducks, frogs, bobcats….and nettles; lots of nettles, a jungle of nettles, olive-drab nettles that tower over seven feet high, with tough, fibrous stalks. If you touch these nettles they’ll sting you with a pain that comes on as fast as an electric shock but lingers like a burn. Needless to say, I don’t go down in the swamp very often.

The nice nettles in the orchard are an entirely different species of plant. The garden nettles will sting you, all right, but it’s a surprising, irritating prickle that they deliver, not the searing flash that their swampy cousins lash out with. And the two plants look a lot different, too, with the garden nettles being fine-stemmed, low-growing, and bright, emerald green in color. It’s said that a weed is merely a plant out of place, and garden nettles definitely live up to this wisdom.

Garden nettles “belong” in the garden; they’re only weeds when or where I don’t want them growing. Sometimes when I have a nice patch of tender, garden nettles I’ll harvest and sell them to the folks that know these “weeds” were brought to California by Italian immigrants who grew them as cooking greens. Garden nettles are excellent used, like spinach, to make savory green sauces or winter-time ravioli fillings. Steep a pinch of garden nettles in hot water and you’ll have a soothing glass of herbal tea in minutes.

The nettle’s many virtues may seem surprising, but when you research many of the so-called “weeds” in a garden you’ll discover that they too are not “wild” plants that have crashed the gates of your garden, but are, in fact, plants that were once esteemed by gardeners and only thrive in garden settings or “disturbed earth.” Sow thistles, for example, are an example of a very antique form of lettuce. “White Goosefoot,” also known as “Fat Hen,” or “Lambsquarters,” is a primitive spinach. In the right context many garden weeds are still appreciated. I’ve sold a lot of Lambsquarters over the years to Greek restaurants, for example, and my Oaxacan farm crew always take home big bunches of this “weed” to cook at home when they can. But nobody that I was aware of ever wanted to eat any swamp nettles.

One day at the Farmers Market a frequent market shopper breezed past the sign I’d posted at the back of my stall that read “BEWARE- STINGING NETTLES. USE TONGS TO HANDLE!”  She thrust her hands into the fresh nettles and then let out a little squeak of pain. I stepped over to point to the sign and hand her the tongs. “They’re not called ‘stinging nettles’ for nothing,” I said.

“Well, they didn’t sting much,” she replied.

“A nettle is covered by tiny tubular silica hairs which are hollow and filled with histamines and acids,” I told her. “The nettle’s sting doesn’t come from an actual prickle, or thorn.When you touch the nettle the silica hairs shatter and the toxins splatter onto you, giving you a chemical burn. When we wash and bag the fresh nettle we break a lot of those hairs, so the leaves don’t sting as much as they might have when they were first picked”

“Do you have any nettles that sting more?” she asked.

So I told her about the swamp nettles and how ferocious they are.

“Those sound perfect,” she said.

So I told her how they’re not preferred for cooking. “Swamp nettles are coarse and fibrous and don’t cook up with a nice appealing green color like garden nettles do,” I said. “When they’re cooked they look like wet army pants; not sexy, not nice to eat and not fun to pick.”

“Swamp nettles sound great,” she said. “I’m not a cook. I run a flogging booth at the Folsom Street Fair and I need wands of fresh, organic stinging nettles.”

“Hmmm,” I thought, reflecting on the wealth of swamp nettles down in the canyon. “Is this an opportunity for ‘brand-able, niche marketing?”

No, I decided. I’d be the first one to get stung, since I can hardly ask someone else to pick them. So my nettles are still down there, growing in the mud. But my garden nettles are tilled under now, and I’m happy. There weren’t enough nettles to harvest as a green but a healthy crop of weeds means that the soil is rich. Nettles appreciate lots of nitrogen in the soil, and they’ll hardly even germinate if ambient nitrogen levels are low. When I see that the nettles are no longer coming up like they used to I know I need to fertilize again. As it is, the ground is perfect for a crop of pumpkins. Maybe by October Covid will be in our rear view mirror and kids will be able to go trick-or-treating. I’ll plant some Jack ‘O Lantern pumpkins in between my little lime trees as a marker for my hopes that this year is better and healthier than the last.