Why Nettles Are Worth the Sting

Most of us meet the stinging nettle as children, usually by falling into a patch of it while wearing shorts. It is worth meeting again as a grown-up, with gloves and a basket, because young nettle tops are among the best free food the British hedgerow offers. They appear in early spring, weeks before anything in the kitchen garden is ready, and they taste somewhere between spinach and cucumber — green, faintly savoury, and surprisingly delicate once cooked.

They are also genuinely good for you, being rich in iron, calcium and vitamin C. And the same plant that ruins a picnic makes a decent soup, a soothing tea and a rinse that leaves hair shining. As with all foraging, the pleasure is half in the eating and half in the walking, so take your time and enjoy the lanes.

Where to Pick, and Where to Leave Alone

Nettles love disturbance. Seek them along quiet footpaths, in old orchards, on the edges of woodland, beside hedges and along the unkempt margins of a meadow. The best patches are usually the ones nobody bothers with.

What matters more than finding a patch is choosing the right one. Nettles are thirsty plants and they take up whatever is in the soil around them, so be choosy:

• Avoid busy roads. Verges beside fast traffic collect exhaust fallout and heavy metals, and you will spend the whole time breathing fumes.
• Avoid popular dog-walking spots. A patch at nose height for a Labrador is not a patch you want in your soup.
• Avoid sprayed ground. Field edges, railway embankments and council verges may be treated with herbicide, and picking there is often against local bye-laws anyway.
• Avoid anything you cannot identify with certainty, and never pick from a patch you have not looked at from a few paces back first.

Take only what you need — a good handful per person is plenty — and never pull up roots. Leave the tall, older plants standing: nettles are the food plant for the caterpillars of peacock, small tortoiseshell and red admiral butterflies, and the seeds feed finches later in the year.

Picking Well: Tops, Gloves and Good Manners

Go out from March to early May, while the plants are still knee-high and the leaves a fresh, deep green. Once nettles flower — usually from late May onwards — they develop tiny gritty crystals that are hard on the kidneys, so stop picking tops and wait instead for the seeds in late summer.

Wear proper gloves: rubber or leather gardening gloves, not thin cotton ones. Pinch or snip the top four to six leaves of each stem, which is the tenderest part. A pair of scissors and a basket or cloth bag work well; plastic bags sweat and wilt the leaves.

Handle your harvest with care at home too. Nettles stay stingy until heat or thorough bruising deactivates the formic acid, so keep gloves on while you rinse them in a colander. Pick over the leaves, discarding stalks, damaged leaves and any little passengers.

Blanching: How to Take the Sting Out

Blanching is the step that turns a prickly hedgerow plant into something you can eat with a spoon, and it takes barely a minute. Bring a large pan of water to a rolling boil, drop in the rinsed leaves, and cook them for 60 to 90 seconds, until they collapse and turn a deep, glossy green.

Lift them straight into a bowl of iced water to keep that colour, then drain and squeeze out the excess water. Your nettles are now safe to handle with bare hands and ready for soup, omelettes, pesto or a buttery side dish. The cooking water, incidentally, is a fine free plant feed once cooled — dilute it roughly one part to ten and tip it on your tomatoes.

A Simple Nettle Soup

This is the recipe that convinces sceptics. You will need a knob of butter, one chopped onion, one diced potato, about a litre of stock, and 200g of blanched nettle tops.

Soften the onion in the butter without colouring it, add the potato and stock, and simmer for fifteen minutes until the potato is tender. Stir in the nettles and cook for two minutes more, then blend until smooth. Season with salt, pepper and a grating of nutmeg, and finish with a swirl of cream or a drizzle of good olive oil. It freezes well, so make double.

Everyday Remedies from the Same Basket

Nettles have been a household standby for centuries, and a few simple preparations are worth knowing. A tea made from a tablespoon of dried leaves steeped in boiling water for ten minutes is traditionally taken for aching joints and for the sneezes of hay fever season — start with a small cup to see how you get on, and avoid it if you are pregnant or on diuretics.

Cooled nettle tea makes a lovely final rinse for dull hair, leaving it soft and glossy. And if you have a patch in the garden you would rather not have, remember that the same leaves that sting your ankles make superb compost. Wear gloves, take a quiet lane, and let the walk be part of the recipe.