Nettles – Weed or Herb? | Uses for a Common Plant

The European Nettle, Urtica dioica, is a common site on wastelands, woodland edges, next to compost heaps and in overgrown gardens. You’ll also find nettles included on purpose in wildlife gardens. But did you know that this has been useful plant for millennia and is still used today?

In fact, scientists at Kew consider it to be one of the most useful plants in Britain.

You’re not convinced?

Let me give you a quick tour of economic botany, wildlife gardening, foraging and culinary delights. Perhaps I can show you how a patch of nettles in your garden can benefit you and your gardening.

Description and Distribution of the Stinging Nettle

The European Nettle, known commonly as Devil’s leaf, heg-beg, hokey-pokey, is an herbaceous perennial and can be as tall as 2 metres. Strong stems carry opposite, paired leaves and small green-white flowers in summer. It propagates by seed and also by roots. The spreading rhizomatous root system enables nettles to colonise areas quickly and effectively.

Known as the stinging nettle, specialised hairs on the underside of the leaves carry toxins and are sharp enough to penetrate human skin. These can cause irritation and itching for as long as 3 days.
The European Nettle is native across both Western and Eastern Europe and it has travelled further afield to become naturalised in many areas. This is probably both accidental and intended, as we shall see the nettle was not always dismissed as a nuisance.

Uses for Nettles – Culinary

Chock full of magnesium, iron and calcium, and one of the first ‘spring greens’ to send out leaves, it’s no wonder that nettles have been cooked with for thousands of years. You’ll be pleased to know that the sting of the nettle disappears on cooking and brewing. The fresh growth is the richest in nutrients and the best for flavour. From mid-June, round about flowering time, the leaves become tougher and bitter tasting. That’s when other uses should be made of your nettle crop. Of course, the usual health and safety rules for foraging apply if that’s how you’re gathering your nettles to eat or drink.

Most often used as a basis for soups in early spring, if the taste doesn’t appeal to you, then add to casseroles as an extra leafy green vegetable. You can also make it into a puree. Add this to quiches, instead of or as well as other early foraged greens from the Chenopodium family, perpetual spinach. I quite like the taste of nettle and sorrel puree as a base for a sort of eggs Florentine. Nettle is also used commercially, for example the mature leaves in Cornish Yarg cheese.

You can brew your own nettle tisane, which is a treat as you can add other flavourings, such as mint or Melissa. But if you’re reaching for nettle tea in the winter months, it will be in the form of a commercially available tea bag. Warning to the initiated, nettle tea whether home brewed or bought, smells a bit like newly mown grass and the taste is an acquired one.
Other liquid nettle drinks are of an alcoholic nature. Nettle wine, nettle beer, nettle ale, nettle gin, nettle vodka are amongst the options available, whether homebrewed or purchased.

Uses for Nettles – in the garden

The uses of nettles in the garden are many. For now, let us consider the humble nettle as:

Garden Pest Control

Nettle aphids are among the earliest aphids to appear in spring and provide an essential food source for ladybirds when they first come out of hibernation. Once they’ve finished the nettle aphids (which are host specific) the ladybirds will happily move onto eating other aphids in your garden.
Not only that, but a clump of nettles provides shade for frogs and toads who will eat those slugs that would like to eat your seedlings. Organic pest control and easy maintenance gardening in one fell swoop!

In Wildlife Gardens

Food for butterflies. Well, food for butterflies when they’re caterpillars. The larval stage of Red Admirals, Peacock butterflies and the Small Tortoiseshell butterfly all feed off nettle leaves. The nettle has a hollow stem which provides a habitat for beetles and bugs over winter. Cut the stems in autumn and leave lying on the ground in a quiet corner. Or add to other stems to create a mini bug hotel. The seeds are a food source for many native birds in late summer.

Compost Activator

Nettle leaves and stems can be added directly to your compost heap. When ‘green’ they will add those nutrients we mentioned earlier. ‘Brown’, or dead, they still add benefits, partly through nutrients but also to help with aeration of the compost bin as the tough fibrous stems take a while to rot down.
Do not add fresh nettle roots to your compost bin! Not unless you want to seriously increase your nettle population, that is. Once dead and dried they can be added.

Liquid Fertiliser

Liquid fertiliser sometimes known as liquid feed, is a method of using the ‘green’ or living roots of weeds that you wouldn’t want to add to your compost bin. Nettle roots are particularly rich in minerals and nutrients so this is a good use when they are ‘surplus to your requirements’. See the Plews blog “Uses for Weeds – Liquid Fertiliser” for how to do this.

Uses for Nettles – other

There are a wide range of uses that nettles have been put to historically. All very interesting to people like me, but possibly less so in detail to some of you. However, some of those historic uses are being investigated for their commercial viability, and are actually, potentially, going to become very useful. A quick look at some of these would therefore seem to be in order.

The nettle has been used to relieve various ailments for centuries. Imagine if you will, Romans combating the effect of the cold, damp northerly climes of Britain by flaying their arthritic joints with a switch of nettles. This is not as daft as it sounds, nettle has anti-inflammatory properties which will help with the symptoms of arthritis, rheumatism and gout. Now we know the nettle has hairs which sting and cause a rash. However, the plant can also provide an anti-histamine and eczema cure.

The stinging nettle has been used as cattle fodder until quite recently. Which makes sense, given those minerals and nutrients. In fact, nettle leaves have one and a half times the amount of iron as most meadow grasses.
Those fibrous stems can be shredded and turned into paper. And of course, cosmetics make use of the rich minerals in the leaves to make skin and hair healthy.

Textiles

Using stinging nettles for textiles, fabric and even rope has been important both historically and currently.

There is archaeological evidence of nettle fibres being woven into cloth going back 3000 years. Much of the historic fabric will have been coarse by modern standards. But then the same could be said of linen and cotton. Modern nettle fabric can be as soft as fine Egyptian cotton and nearly as soft as silk. Nettle is not the easiest or cheapest plant material to use on a commercial level, but at least one firm in Germany is producing it. Production of nettle cloth in Sweden was carried out until recently.

You could try making your own garden twine from nettle fibres; its easy enough if a bit fiddly. But it would be another way to grow your own and generally be resourceful.

Nettles – Weed or Herb?

Definition of an herb: generally considered to be a plant with medicinal, culinary or cosmetic uses. Certainly one noted for a use other than the purely ornamental or purely edible. The European Nettle, Urtica dioica, is by this definition an herb rather than a weed. Except, perhaps, when it’s growing in the wrong place; which is an acceptable, loose definition of a weed.

What do you think? Will you now look at that patch of nettles with a different eye?

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