Harvesting Nettle Love! Primetime for this Healing Wild SuperFood

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Harvesting Nettle Love! It's Primetime for this Healing Wild SuperFood
Learn to ID, harvest and use this nutrient dense, blood building herb.

Stinging nettle, who gifts us with potent food and herbal medicine, is at its leafy peak. Grab your harvest basket and tap the flow of this deep green beauty.

Stinging Nettle Gifts:
This fiery wild herb, scientifically called Urtica dioica, is a perennial of the Urticaceae family. A nourishing wild food and tonic herbal medicine, nettle is an excellent example of where food and medicine meet.

This nutrient dense, healing ally is a stimulating, heating, blood-building tonic (high in calcium, magnesium, and iron) that supports the kidneys, adrenals, and circulation.

Use it to increase blood flow in general and to resolve wet cold conditions in the respiratory system. Often used in recipes for improving skin, hair, joints, allergies and arthritic conditions.

Flavor: Nettle leaf has a rich, hearty (meaty), deep-green flavor—deeper, richer, and gamier than kale or spinach. Aroma: green chlorophyll (not aromatic).

As a tea / infusion, enjoy its rich flavor alone, or combine it with mint, lemon balm or other aromatic herbs.

Culinary Uses
Cook in soup, stew, sauté, creamed, omelet, frittata, quiche, gratin, casserole, and more!!! Dry it, and add it powdered to everything, even popcorn or herbal truffles.

This is a favorite wild edible, filled with over-the-top nutrient density plus powerful plant chemistry that can make one happy and tingly!

CAUTIONARY NOTE: Contraindicated for irritated folks, highly fiery, pitta conditions, rash-y situations, ulcers.; someone who already has too much heat.
With any wild food (or new food in general) or herb, start with small bites and see how your body responds.

Harvest
For Tea: Here in NY harvesting for tea usually starts around mid spring (now). Harvest leaf and stem before it starts to flower. You can do a few harvests in one growing season depending on how well nourished and watered the nettle patch is. I suggest harvesting the upper third of the plant.

For Food:
Gather leaf and stem when it is tender. Right now I gather 3–5 nodes down from the top. As the plant matures and gets taller, it becomes more medicinal and less food-like, and tougher. Still you can harvest the tops (1–2 nodes down) for food if it feels good to you. I often do this.

For PROTECTION wear gloves and use scissors when harvesting, as fine hairs cover the plant that can inject us with chemicals that cause irritation, aka urtication.

LOOK FOR it in full sun to part shade in moist, fertile, well drained soil, in meadows, riverbanks, woodland openings, edges, compost piles, gardens. Hardiness Zones (USDA): 4–8. Found throughout the temperate zones of the world.

Subspecies Fun
In our video we focus on the monoecious subspecies Urtica dioica subspecies gracilis native to the USA, where male and female flowers are on the same plant. Urtica dioica subspecies dioica is a native of Eurasia and is dioecious with male (staminate) flowers and female (carpellate) flowers on separate plants. But, don’t worry, both subspecies are used interchangeably.

ID
-Fine hairs cover the plant that can inject us with irritating chemicals.
-Nettle has egg to lance shaped, opposite leaves, with sharply toothed (serrated) leaf margins.
-Its leaves have a long stalk (aka petiole).
-Later in the season the leaves elongate = lanceolate.
-At the nodes are four oblong to linear stipules that look like mouse ears. --Nodes are where the leaf stalk meets the main stem.
-Main stem has four ribs that look rope-like.
-Nettle has rhizomatous roots that like to spread.

REMINDER AND LINKS TO VIEW OUR OTHER NETTLE VIDEOS HERE:
Nettle roots:    • Digging STINGING NETTLE ROOT: Learn t...  ,
Nettle shoots    • Bring on the Nettle & Chickweed Love:...  ,
Nettle infusion:    • Nettle Love! Nourish-Me Tea + Herbal ...  ,
Nettle seed:    • Meet STINGING NETTLE SEEDS = Perky Su...  

Wishing you nettle love!
In gratitude,
Dina

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