Herb Spotlight: Nettle

     Welcome back! Today I'm starting yet another new series, this time about various different herbs, why I love them and think they're cool, and a few different ways they can be used.

    Today's spotlight is the stinging nettle, Latin name Urtica dioica. 

    I know. Since when did anybody like stinging nettles?

    But as careful as I am when considering the nettles growing in my sister's herb garden, when I started doing research into them for story purposes, I couldn't help but fall in love.

    So what do nettles do, anyway?

    According to Herbs and Old Time Remedies (lovingly and somewhat mockingly called 'Elia's favorite book' by my sister, because I reference it so often), nettle is a valuable source of food. When used as a pot herb, or steamed and added to a salad, the nettle's stinging hairs get softened by the hot water so they can't sting you anymore, making it much more convenient to access the nutrients: vitamins A, C, D, and E; iron, silicon, potassium, calcium (and it doesn't just have calcium; nettle helps the body absorb calcium, too), sodium, copper, manganese, chromium, and zinc. That's a lot of trace nutrients.

    HaOTR goes on to list a few of the medicinal uses of nettles, spending approximately two pages on that subject, and mentions that there's a lot more nettles can do for you than it can cover. I highly recommend that book; while it doesn't actually explain how to use the various herbs, as a general overview and reference, it's incredibly useful, and if there are herbs that look interesting, it gives you a point to jump off of for your research. And that's just for medicinal herb uses, not practical ones!

    To anyone who has read Les Miserables recently, there is apparently a passage in there referring to nettle, and how poor laborers were tearing it out of the fields and burning it--and burning a valuable resource in the process, because of all the ways it could be used. If I remember correctly, it even mentions the use that I really wanted to talk about in this post: using nettles to make textiles.

    To turn this particular plant into cloth, you have to first harvest the nettle. A lot of it. Then, when you have a good bunch of it, you have to strip the leaves off. You don't need the leaves for this process, so you can go ahead and dry them, boil them, or stew them, all of which are ways to remove the prickles, and use them as food or tea or medicine.

    Now you have a bunch of stalks. The next thing you have to do is soak them for a long while. Some people tie their stalks together into bundles and use rocks to submerge them in nearby ponds, rivers, or lakes; some people just fill a large tub with water and soak the stalks there. Once the stalks have had at least a week, maybe two to ferment, you have to dry them out again, then split them and pull the fibers out.

    That right there is a ton of work just to get the fibers. Involved in that ton of work is the actual harvesting process, for which you'd likely want a leather jacket and some really beefy leather gloves, because personally, I'd rather the nettles sting the skin of a dead animal than sting mine. I've grabbed nettles with my bare hands before; it's not fun, and even the remedial herbs (primarily mullein, around here) don't solve the problem immediately.

    But hey! Once the stalks have all been soaked, dried, and split, you have the fibers! The rest is easy, right?

    Uh... no. Because now you need to clean, card, spin, and weave those fibers into cloth, and that is a long process.

    The carding part isn't too bad. You know those wire brushes pet stores sell for you to brush your cats' mats out with? Apparently, those can be used for carding, no problem. Basically, you just want to get all your fibers straightened out and smoothened so they can be spun. Kinky, tangled fibers are never going to get through a spinning wheel, so the carding helps to break them apart and make them pliable.

    But now you have to spin the fibers. There's a video from an experienced seamstress trying to spin her own linen thread for the first time, and it's not an easy task. Apparently flax-fiber linen is a lot harder to spin than wool, and from what I've seen in my research, nettle fibers are a lot more like flax fibers than they are like wool--which does make sense, given that flax and nettle are both plants, while wool comes from an animal.

    Once you've spun the fibers into thread, you now have to weave them into cloth. I've done very little research into the actual weaving process, but I'm fairly certain that, for a person weaving cloth by hand, you'd need both a lot of thread and a lot of time. In some ways, I think it would almost be easier to spin a thick wool yarn and knit all your clothes than it would be to spin fine nettle-fiber thread and weave it into cloth.

    Once the weaving is complete, you have a nice nettle 'linen' cloth to start sewing clothing with!

    I can almost imagine being a young woman in the medieval time period, learning to make clothing out of nettles. I'd be so overjoyed to have finished my first bolt of nettle 'linen'. I'd probably be bouncing to the roof in my excitement to have the project done.

    "But wait, apprentice Elia," my master would say. "This cloth does you no good until you make clothes with it."

    And then I would be incredibly discouraged, because I hate sewing and it was a labor to make my first cloak, despite the simplicity of, essentially, sewing a hood onto a blanket.

    So what's involved in making clothes?

    Well, there are patterns to follow. First you have to cut the cloth into the requisite shapes, then sew it together (by hand, if you're a medieval person). And make sure when you're cutting the cloth that you have plenty of seam allowance and room to hem it; you wouldn't want your brand-new tunic fraying and falling apart around you, would you? And it takes quite a lot of cloth to make even the simplest of clothes. I'd estimate that when my sister is sewing herself a new outfit, a single shirt and wraparound skirt probably takes around two square yards of fabric. Going back to our nettle amounts, how much nettle do you think you'd have to harvest to get enough fibers to make enough thread to weave two square yards of fabric?

    A lot.

    And that, my friends, is why I have no interest in actually turning nettles into fabric. For one thing, we don't have a nettle-patch big enough for that. For another, the effort it would take to turn a bunch of nettles into clothes is more than I want to exert, especially since it would mean I'd have to learn half a dozen completely new skills.

    I already hate sewing enough; I'm not inflicting that on myself.

    However, I am willing to inflict that on my characters. I think nettle linen is super cool, and if you're a fictional young woman living wild in the mountains and want to wear more than leather in your everyday life, I will happily give you the requisite equipment and skills to make your own nettle linen.

    (Hint: At the time of writing this, I'm thinking up just such a character.)

    Of course, there's a lot more nettles can be used for, such as making dye for cloth. This plant is something I highly recommend researching, especially if you're interested in writing your own stories, since the sheer versatility of this herb means you could probably find a way to throw it into the majority of story situations. And even if all you want to do is have some characters wearing nettle linen, I say go for it! We need more unusual textiles in fantasy!