Under a hawthorn hedge and all along the bank grows one of Britain’s most feared and reviled plants. I kneel down before it and feel its power. Its hairs, just a few millimetres long and looking like icicle spears, have pierced both my trousers and the skin of my knee, releasing toxins that tingle with fiery heat.
Even so, I reach out to grasp one of these plants between thumb and forefinger. I have come not to curse nettles, but to pick them, for their stinging hairs have no answer to gardening gloves, and their ferocious leaves can be tamed in a saucepan.
Experts advise nipping off only the topmost leaves of Urtica dioica. Most come easily, but sometimes the whole plant pulls away; this is softened “waste” ground that generations of rabbits have dug over again and again.
Territorial chaffinches and robins sing over my head. They have left chalky splats on some leaves. Avoid, and think of them as fertiliser for next year.
Our prehistoric ancestors cooked with nettles, and the plants were a “make-do” ingredient during wartime. But nettles can still be a boon to our contemporary eclectic cuisine. This week, I have eaten nettle dumplings, and nettle and sorrel risotto, as well as stored a couple of litres of evil-looking cooking liquid in the freezer as future vegetable stock.
Best of all, at a time when basil seedlings on the window ledge can scarcely be coaxed to push their first puny leaves out of a potting tray, nettles make a more than passable pesto. As they cook, the leaves have the shrinking properties of spinach, quickly reducing to a green mush.
Just as millions of people prefer buying a handful of shrink-wrapped blackberries in a supermarket to enduring the reality of thorns and wasps, so the nettle’s sting and wrinkled appearance is a deterrent that is too much for most. Even deer avoid all but the tasselled flowers.
But this is an early spring harvest. After mid-May, the dull, dark green, nettles become unpleasantly mature, tough and fibrous, too strong in flavour. They are best left alone as prickly bowers for the caterpillars.
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