Kitchen Garden Forum

Why every garden should have a patch... of nettles.
Please feel free to add other tips.

Nettles support up to 40 species of insect including some of our most beautiful butterflies Admiral, Small Tortoishell, Comma and Peacock and are an early food source where aphids overwinter for ladybirds who will sally forth and devour your garden insect pests too. Their seeds provide food for seed eating garden birds.

Nettles make a good fertiliser if bruised and weighted down and soaked in a bucket, can get a bit smelly while decomposing, use diluted about the colour of tea.
sprayed over foliage it deters pest species and helps prevent fungal diseases.

Nettles are a good addition to the compost heap, rich in nitrogen they help bacteria break down the more woody stuff.

Fresh young nettle tips collected in spring are very nutritious, they make a wonderfully refreshing nettle beer to drink in the heat of summer and can be cooked like spinach, added to stews, and made into soup

...and nettles are also a powerful poetic image.

NETTLES by Vernon Scannell

My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.
'Bed' seemed a curious name for those green spears,
That regiment of spite behind the shed:
It was no place for rest. With sobs and tears
The boy came seeking comfort and I saw
White blisters beaded on his tender skin.
We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.
At last he offered us a watery grin,
And then I took my billhook, honed the blade
And went outside and slashed in fury with it
Till not a nettle in that fierce parade
Stood upright any more. And then I lit
A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead,
But in two weeks the busy sun and rain
Had called up tall recruits behind the shed:
My son would often feel sharp wounds again.


NETTLES by Neil Munro

O sad for me Glen Aora,
Where I have friends no more,
For lowly lie the rafters,
And the lintels of the door.
The friends are all departed,
The hearth-stone's black and cold,
And sturdy grows the nettle
On the place beloved of old.
O! black might be that ruin
Where my fathers dwelt so long,
And nothing hide the shame of it,
The ugliness and wrong;
The cabar and the corner-stone
Might bleach in wind and rains,
But for the gentle nettle
That took such a courtier's pains.

Here's one who has no quarrel
With the nettle thick and tall,
That hides the cheerless hearthstone
And screens the humble wall,
That clusters on the footpath
Where the children used to play,
And guards a household's sepulchre
From all who come the way.

There's deer upon the mountain,
There's sheep along the glen,
The forests hum with feather,
But where are now the men?
Here's but my mother's garden
Where soft the footsteps fall,
My folk are quite forgotten,
But the nettle's over all.



THE STINGING NETTLE by A. E. Housman

The stinging nettle only
Will still be found to stand:
The numberless, the lonely,
The thronger of the land,
The leaf that hurts the hand.

That thrives, come sun, come showers;
Blow east, blow west, it springs;
It peoples towns, and towers
Above the courts of Kings,
And touch it and it stings.


TALL NETTLES by Edward Thomas

TALL nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

Every allotment site should have outside the fence or hedge a six foot deep nettle bed both for the beneficial insects and the destructive two-legged pests.

Alan, I really enjoyed the poems, thank you.
Peter, we have a wide natural strip around the farmland behind us, full of different trees nettles and bramble etc, very beneficial to us and the farmer, full of shrews, sloworms, hedgehogs birds, including pheasants and insects.

The nettles in the footpath near us are, alas, just full of dog poo and dog pee. There must be some dogs with very uncomfortable parts around here !

Hi Primrose. Yuk, not very thoughtful dog owners - they should clear up the mess their dogs leave for the sake of children especially, not pleasant for adults either.

Just two points as an addition to NB's helpful advice about nettles:

To be attractive to the butterflies mentioned for egg laying, the nettles must grow in a sunny, sheltered spot - probably your best vegetable or flower growing area!

When the first flush of nettles has grown tall, say in July, cut half of the patch right back, so that the second generation of butterflies has fresh nettles to lay their eggs on.

I enjoyed your poems, Alan!

Monika, that was a thoughtful tip about new growth for the second generation, there are lots of nettles at the edge of the tree line behind us, will these be less attractive to the butterflies in semi shade?

Butterflies really only lay their eggs in sunny spots, so if your patch gets the sun at some time of the day, it should be ok. What I wanted to warn about is, that when people cultivate nettles for butterflies, they often pick the spot where nothing else will grow, but nettles really need the sun to be attractive to insects.

I'm not convinced that anything needs to be done to encorage nettles, they appear to manage well all by themselves. I do get plenty of seedlings from the vast patch at the end of our allotment.

This http://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Nettles-Required-Reassuring-Gardening/dp/1903919681 book is the one I was trying to remember about.