Be Nice To Nettles

Here’s a moral dilemma. We have lots of nettles growing around the house and around the gallery. Normally, I would ‘cull’ these troublesome plants on a regular basis by either digging them out or using my trusty strimmer to cut them off just above the ankles. However, this is ‘Be Nice To Nettles Week’ so my activities have been curtailed. We are being encouraged to love our nettles and to value the benefits they bring – vitamins and minerals when added to food, healing powers as a medicinal herb, restorative qualities in shampoos and conditioners and amazingly as a source of fibre in textiles and composite materials. There is even talk of cultivating and processing nettles commercially.

Even more incredible is the claim that nettles can motivate football teams as reported by Louise Taylor in the Sunday Times:

"Mick McCarthy will be hard pressed to devise team talks as imaginative as Howard Wilkinson's. Before Sunderland played Liverpool last December, McCarthy's predecessor arrived in the home dressing room carrying a bag of nettles. First Wilkinson demonstrated that squeezing the plants slowly in his palm stung painfully. Then he grasped the nettles swiftly and firmly, before explaining that this approach hurt less.

The point was to warn his players that Liverpool would aim to lull Sunderland into complacency before stinging them on the counter-attack; a tactic that could be negated by curtailing such breaks at source. On that occasion a 2-1 victory - only one of two in 20 premiership games during Wilkinson's reign - resulted."

I can’t claim any such miraculous powers for my local nettles – so their reprieve is only temporary. Saturday morning will see me out with spade and strimmer continuing my programme of eradication – albeit with a heavy heart and a new appreciation of this ‘super plant’.

Comments

[Liz Curtis]

All the good things you say about nettles involve cutting them down first, then using their poor dying bodies. So, I say, go for the chop and then boil them or whatever.