Posts Tagged ‘stinging nettles’

20 Feb

Planning Your Garden: the Weed Patch, and more on the Peruvian Purple Potato

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, greens, herbs, home food production, sustainable, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while know about my interest in useful weeds, ie plants which thrive on neglect, spread rapidly, and are often overlooked, but offer good eating. Now that I’m planning a brand-new garden from scratch, I’m planning a “weed patch” as part of it. This will be out of the path of garden traffic so that I can have milk thistles and nettles, and screened from the rest of the property with a row of sunflowers so that nobody but me has to look at it much, and there all my favorite edible thugs can slug it out together. If you have room for a weed corner, you might consider some of these:

1. Stinging nettle. The nettle offers some of the best early-spring greens to be found. You can start them from seed (try Johnny’s Selected Seeds) or from plants (Richter’s is the only source that I know of.) They spread like wildfire, so underground barriers or a spot that you can mow all the way around are essential. See my post for harvesting and cooking details, and treat this plant with great respect, because the sting is pretty painful.
2. Curly Mallow. I like the leaves as part of a mix of greens, and it thrives on heat and doesn’t need too much water. I got the seeds from Nichols Garden Nursery years ago, and it’s been happily self-seeding ever since.
3. Milk thistle. THis will be a new one for me, but I’m told that the young shoots make good cooked greens when the prickles are trimmed off, so I’ll give it a try.
4. Sorrel. This might not seem like a weed, but it’s a healthy, vigorous, weedy-looking plant, so it can stay in the weed patch, out of the way. You can get seed almost anywhere, even from seed racks. It’s best to let it grow the first year, just removing flower stalks as they appear, and then start harvesting in early spring the second year.
5. Curled dock. This comon roadside weed is sour and bitter at most stages of development, but in the late fall and very early spring it’s one of the best greens around. Like its relative sorrel, it turns brownish-green when cooked, so I use it in mixtures of cooked greens rather than by itself. I don’t know of any source for the seeds. I picked mine by the roadside years ago, and this robust perennial has been with me ever since.
6. Dandelions. Like dock, they are actively distasteful most of the year, but in very early spring they offer delicious lightly bitter leaves which give a wild tang to a mixed salad or a little zip to a cooked greens mixture.

An alert reader let me know recently that the source I gave for the Peruvian Purple Potato no longer offers them. I save my own starter potatoes from year to year, but you can get the Peruvian from Ronnigers. They also have a splendid assortment of garlics, and some other plants of interest.

9 Mar

The Greens of Spring: Stinging Nettles

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, greens, herbs, home food production, recipe, sustainable, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

march-09
Stinging nettles are a pernicious weed in damp parts of the country. The sting is painful and the plant is weedy-looking. So why did I make an effort to have them here in New Mexico? Well, because the greens are delicious and extremely nutritious and they come up with no effort once established.
I had no luck starting from seed, and bought plants from Richter’s in Canada. They are a wonderful source for rare herbs, and well worth knowing about. The plants arrived last spring. I put them in a piece of waste ground where nothing much would grow and where they would be prevented from excessive spreading by walls and mown paths . This is very important, because once established, they turn their forces toward world domination. I watered them deeply once a week and mulched them heavily.
This spring, each little plant from last year is surrounded by dozens of offspring. They sting fiercely, so don’t go near them without gloves and long pants. When they’re about six inches high, use heavy gloves and a pair of scissors to harvest them. Wash in a few changes of water, using wooden spoons to swirl them in the water and lift them out to avoid the thousand tiny painful injections of formic acid that they are trying to give you. Until they are cooked well, they can sting. Now cook them any way you like. My favorite way to cook the first batch of spring is to put them in a hot skillet with some water still clinging to them, add a knob of good butter and a little salt, turn the heat down, and saute’ until cooked. Turn out on a cutting board, chop well (I hate long stringy stems in greens, and since nettles have stringy stems, I strongly recommend that you don’t skip this step) and serve with a little more butter on top. They are a startling deep iron-green and very, very good. Later in the season, I use them in greens mixtures and boreks and all the ways I love to eat greens. For more of my favorite greens recipes, visit my website’s recipe page.
Within six weeks of the first picking, they will be coarse and no longer taste good, and their texture will become gritty and unpleasant. This is why you want them in an obscure spot. Control their spread, avoid being stung, let them do their weedy thing, and turn your attention to other vegetables. Early next spring, when you’re sick of cold winds and desperate to reconnect with the awakening earth,they’ll be there.

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