The Sting of Spring

Nettles, Vulnerability, and Penance

"Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety" 

William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I (Act II, Scene 3)

Even on 25 degree mornings, there is little visible frost on the emergent cool-season grasses that green-up and grasp the frozen, fallen petals of Nanking cherries. It could be relative humidity, or lack thereof, or the suddenly persistent north wind. I have immediately smeared my ungloved hand with warm duck shit this morning. The nearest green leaf to clean my hands with belongs to the nettle patch, so I make do with an old sunflower stalk instead.

I tend towards believing that it is instinctually human to reflexively grasp at vegetation– we sometimes strip a handful of leaves from the giving boughs of summer yards, or pull at the sod when sitting on a playing field, or break twigs, pop yolky tops of dandelions, decapitate daffodils, and shatter seeds like broken rosary beads when we amble through the ripening prairie. We even grasp nettles with our un-calloused, early spring hands when we emerge from our dwellings, softened by winter, and they from their own subterranean network of knotlike fibrous rhizomes fed on forest muck and candied sunlight in the form of root starch.

Now this next part is not medical advice, but you ought to try flagellating yourself with nettles if you’re feeling rheumatic. Urtication, they call it. You could choose to do it for arthritis, creakiness, as a bracing morning ritual, or if your prefer, self-punishment. In some way or another, we all deserve to feel stinging nettles, at least once a year. I’d like to think it keeps us in line. Humans have even used stinging nettles as corporal punishment, and while it doesn’t sound like a nice thing to do to people, neither does our modern prison industrial complex— so who am I to judge? I would gladly take brief pain and humiliation meted out by my own community over serving time processing industrial foodstuffs, surrounded by razor wire and overseen by the state.

A depiction of self-flagellation dating from the Black Death. Technically, not urtication, but penance nonetheless.

If you’d like sham medical advice, it is out there and available. Rheumatism or no, I really do recommend urtication for stirring your bodily motivation and driving the remnants of winter sloth from your bones and joints, and I’m not a shill for Big Nettle. They will probably not protect you from lightning or improve male fertility as some purport, but nettles do have a remarkable ability to enliven our senses and fill in the nutritional gaps of an otherwise spartan winter diet of squash and salted pork. Rip out some nettles and eat them. Eat them raw, by plucking the leaves and rolling them over and over until their spines (technically trichomes or spicules) are crushed, or just fold them underside out and swallow like a goat. Or if you prefer, carefully clip great bowlfuls of leaves and blanch them and poach them in butter or pancetta or milk, but they do cook down quite a lot. 

Stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) are omnipresent— their native range encompassing Europe, temperate Asia, and Western North Africa, and generally springing up in the footprints of human habitation, often signaling fertility. In fact, the high levels of phosphorous and nitrogen that nettles prefer are common in manure and associated runoff– any kind of manure– so do pay attention to your surroundings when harvesting. Sometimes, a spreading nettle patch may mark the former location of a homestead, but much like our cattle which have been repeatedly breaking out of their little early season paddock, the nettle is soon unencumbered by human-imposed boundaries once spring warmth and rain signals green growth.

When I’m not in the mood for self-chastisement, I like to harvest nettles by grasping the tippy top daintily with my thumb and forefinger, and snipping whole, clean plants to the base. I bring these in and further snip the leaves from the fibrous stalk. Many of y’all are likely familiar with Euell Gibbons, who I must credit with popularizing foraging in the American mainstream at a very hygienic and shame-based moment, namely, the early 1960’s. Euell Gibbons was a freak for the time: a former hobo, former cowboy, former communist, converted Quaker, proto-health-nut, vagrant beachcomber, Grape Nuts pitchman and late night talk show personality. All of his recipes for cattail, nettle, lambsquarters and such can be summed up as boil, add butter and salt to taste– as freaky as folks could handle during the Cold War. 

Euell Gibbons- Writer and Foraging Proto-Freak

The thing about nettles here in North America, of course, is that they like to take over. They are endemic escapees from cultivation, so many woodlands now harbor wide patches of nettle in their understory. I have never traded a cow for magic beans, but I did purchase some “Less Sting” nettle rhizomes once… perhaps one of the dumbest things I’ve done while homesteading. Just get stung and eat what you already have… we deserve all the stinging sensations we can get. 

Before flowering, when the nettles grow tall, we fill a cart or two from the woods and dry the leaves for a year round supply. They dehydrate easily without supplemental energy and stay nice and green. We make a flaky powder with dried nettles that, like corn and soy, is ubiquitous in our diet. After flowering, nettles develop cystoliths, or a fine grit of hardened calcium carbonate with an unpleasant mouthfeel. Cystoliths are readily dissolved through acidic fermentation– so you can always make a batch of nettle kraut when things flower.

Nettles have a renneting capability in the manufacture of cheeses, and nettle as a flavoring has worked its way into traditional goudas, Cornish Yarg, and certainly other vernacular cheeses. Nettle stems contain a bast fiber, which can be worked similarly to linen through retting, or intentional enzymatic decay, to create clothing, ship masts or cordage for fishing nets, and both the root and the leaves are a useful dyestuff.

Unlike the native ephemera of spring foraging– mushrooms, woodland corms, and the like– there is no risk of overharvesting nettle ever. It is a cosmopolitan plant, and as such will always spring up in our footsteps. The defenses of nettle are obvious, and as an early, nutritious green, it is resilient in the face of overharvesting or browsing. Nettle gives, and our obligation is to take. If we cannot consume or preserve it all, and we never could, we turn to pulling out whole plants as an ingredient in our compost pile, or fling it our the poultry, voracious for forage in the lengthening daylight and awakening warmth. It is a generous plant, and in exchange, all we owe it is a little dermatitis.

Other imported food plants are less inclined to the fickle spring weather. The apples and pears, and to a lesser extent, plums and peaches are swelling and bursting at their buds, and yet we are not out of the clear in terms of frost damage to early fruits. Trees we’ve planted in particularly sunny microclimates bear the brunt of the damage, often opening early. In the past few years I’ve begun to plant earlier blossoming trees on the north face of slopes to slightly retard the process of bud break, but after years of worriedly covering blossoming trees with row cover and blankets on sudden cold nights has ceased, alongside my anxiety. If novice orchardists are prone to one thing, it may be treating each potential fruit as sacred. They are not, and allowing the frost and wind to prune our trees ultimately leads to larger, better quality fruits.

Pears and apples and peaches and cherries are a bit like us temperate climate humans– they need a little rough handling to properly toughen them after a sedentary winter. Some folks take to striking their fruit trees with sticks to wake them up. I prefer to let them eke it out in this season of transition and climate drama– low temperatures on the horizon will offer them enough challenges without bashing them with a stick. It is not inconceivable that such temperate climate crops may not have the tenacity of nettles in the face of a changing climate, and that  years from now nettle pesto will have to replace apple sauce as a viable food source– and that’s one of the cheerier predictions I could make.

Emergent life is vulnerable in the fickle weather. The willow tips are profuse with explosion of golden pollen and buzzing bees unaware of the icy gloom pushing its way south from Canada. In the morning, the sprouting muck will be strewn with wilted blossoms and twitching insect life. Wild hops shrink from the sudden bite of winter. We have hatched our first precious batch of chicks this season, and at least one turkey hen has gone broody thus far… though I have seen snow on the tenth of April here, maybe later. The precocious blossoms of Nanking cherry and sprawling, reaching shoots of spring peas hesitantly expose their fleshy and fragile appendages into a cold and indifferent wind. I received an email from the nursery folks over at the Chestnut Improvement Network, who are currently holding onto the 250 Chinese chestnut seedlings we’ve been preparing for these past few weeks with the news that they, too, have broken bud prematurely, and must now be kept in semi-suspended animation, beneath plastic tarps and foam insulation until the polar gales of exiting winter burn off for good. We do our best to buffer our crops against the unknowable complex patterns of air masses and ocean heat and jet stream breakdowns, while the dandelions and nettles and peppergrass soldier on into the fitful season.

Weeds are one guaranteed crop in our garden— may they be edible rather than noxious.

The hurry-up-and-wait nature of this logistically complicated agroforestry project has been a little painful at times. Coordinating cash, delivery, labor, materials and machinery would all be exhausting under ideal conditions, and the capricious stuttering clash of warm air masses and cold air masses, soaking rains and sudden frost have made for an additional layer of complication. It has been at times a profoundly frustrating undertaking, and always humbling. And while in the world of field scale annual agriculture, the entire enterprise does not necessarily hinge on the results of one poorly timed planting (in fact, crop insurance payouts can make these mistakes fairly lucrative in some situations), this is a century long endeavor, one deserving of the highest level of care, considering the stakes at hand and associated resources.

Farming can be equal parts timing and luck– good or bad. With years of experience, we can begin to predict when it is best to sow lettuce or peas, or transplant eggplants, or set eggs under broody hens, or plant trees. We have data sets of historical averages, somewhat unreliable at 425.48 ppm carbon dioxide, accumulated but often vague recollections of April blizzards and hot Februarys. Some folks choose to go with the Lunar Calendar– including some of the most respected growers in my life– but with 5 acres of trees on the line, the assurance I need to move forward is not currently granted by any folklore nor law of averages in such uncertain times.

Vulnerability is a calculation we must all make. I’ve learned to differentiate between cutting it too close with a garden pea crop and doing harm to thousands of dollars worth of seedstock, and so we wait. My own fleshy appendages also risk vulnerability and damage, not so much in the cold as within the pages of this very almanac– even on a platform like Substack, which allows for as much nuance as readers are willing to digest– the distorted nature of communication, storytelling, and this platform’s own insistence on looking a little bit more like social media with every new feature is sometimes perilous for things dear to me, hence the pen name and the many omitted details of life here. Putting myself out there as a person with some hope for substantive change in how we relate to land is probably a foolish enough exposure of my character for the time being.

Self-Portrait, April 2023

I try to reckon with the nagging shadow of my own impostor syndrome by always telling the truth in these pages, acknowledging that the truths I leave unwritten are largely for my own sense of security and defensive compartmentalization. Overexposure in the uncertainty of a rapidly changing environment can lead to harm, physical and spiritual, and in a world where small farmers are led to believe we must become storytellers, the existential threat of open and admitted failure feels like a liability for some. But the alternative, lying about the success of our enterprises, will only feed hopeless naivete, and in turn waste and degradation.  I find it best to grasp for nettles when I write.

Gleaming buds plumpen on my pathway– I pick one off an apple tree that will likely form a stem that will project into the well-worn trail at its side. Farming is equal parts timing and luck, harvest and cull. My own fears, of control, hierarchy, and human supremacy have led me towards letting nature take its shaky course in regards to some of the fruit. At least that’s what I’m saying now… when it hits 18 degrees, you might see me stumbling with a headlamp and a cartload of scrounged blankets, heaving rolls of wool and polyester over the hapless blooming limbs of peach and plum. Because the loss of a crop feels like failure, and accumulating failures can hurt just as much as they can inform. Learning by mistakes has its limits on the farm, where we deal with real living things as well as the very integrity of land and ecology. Every day, I try to remember what a privilege it is to have access to land, and that by taking land out of a purely natural system, or away from its own inhabitants,  with the intention of feeding others and then failing to do so is a destructive and unacceptable exercise of that privilege. 

Meanwhile, impervious and invulnerable, the nettles rise along the ephemeral cricks and deep leaf litter of oaks, ever prepared to feed humanity from the margins in exchange for that critical sting which signs the contract between a people and a place– that we too must engage in the sharp hurt of surviving and subsisting in the all-too-real world of wilderness and its desecration, the push and pull of a planet responding to our insatiable extraction and disruption. What direction will the wind be blowing in from tomorrow, and will it be hot or frigid? I could consult with the National Weather Service, as I do at least 5 times a day, but I think I’ll forego that for now, and instead grasp heedlessly into this necessary work with the knowledge that some of the things I take hold of will eventually hurt my body, if not my pride. I s’pose it’s the punishment I’ve been asking for all along.