nettles and eggs / harvesting and cooking nettles

[paul wheaton]

Nettle season isn't too far away in some areas so I thought it would be a good time to upload some footage from last year.

This video is a bit long (ten minutes) and covers a lot of detail of harvest and cooking for folks that might harvest and eat nettles for the first time.

http://www.youtube.com/paulwheaton12#p/u/0/Rsfi4ULxtic

 

[lalaland]

Thanks, now I am craving nettles! When I moved on to this land 4 years ago, to my great disappointment there were no nettles. None.

But, last year I discovered a wonderful patch at my neighbors, next to an abandoned sheep shed, of course. They don't mow or do anything with that part of their land, and let me pick to my hearts content last spring. Can't wait for spring now.

This year I'm going to make some tinctures as they have plenty of nettles. yum!

 

[savingdogs]

Thank you so much for this. Our property is literally covered with this plant.

 

[me&thegals]

Ahhhh, nettles. I include them in our spring CSA deliveries each spring We enjoy them in soup and quiche, but I'd like to try infusing them this year for soap making!

 

[savingdogs]

I make soap, too. Why would you want them in the soap?

 

[me&thegals]

I've read about nettle soap being wonderful for the skin. No links right now and no time to search for them, but some of the most beautiful soap I have seen had nettles in it. I'm assuming the lye process would take care of any stinging...

 

[savingdogs]

I've also heard about nettles in soup....at first I thought I miss-read your post because I thought you were talking about soup, not soap!

For soap, would you chop it or make an infusion or what? I'm trying to picture little bit of green plant in the soap and somehow that doesn't sound real user-friendly.

I'm not exaggerating that I have probably a quarter acre in nettles. This could be really useful for me, especially when so far, it has been a highly annoying plant! :/

 

[lwheelr]

You can also make vegan rennet out of nettles.

I avoid nettles, because I have an auto-immune disease, and they will aggravate that.

 

[savingdogs]

Why is that, lwheelr? I had read that nettles were good for people with allergies (which I have), but I'm also auto immune. I thought allergies were a sign of auto immunity as well. Are nettles good or bad for these things, do you know?

 

[lwheelr]

I'm not sure about their effect on allergies. I do know that they are an immune booster. Immune boosters make the immune system MORE sensitive to invading cells, which aggravates auto-immune responses.

With auto-immune disease, usually some kind of damage occurs to your own cells, which triggers your immune system to view them as invaders - only they are still close enough to your own cells that it eventually turns on healthy cells as well, because it will identify them both as the same thing. Some naturalists criticize this, saying the body would not do that, but in fact, it does. Things can get damaged and out of balance so that the body does completely unnatural things.

There is ample evidence that this is a sound premise, and I have experienced evidence of it twice in my life as well. When I was pregnant with my last daughter, I became allergic to injected insulin. I stopped taking it, but for the next two weeks, every time I ate and my body released MY insulin, I had a repeat allergic reaction, because the recumbent DNA insulin allergy had made me hyper sensitive, and I had become sensitized to my own insulin as well - the recumbent DNA insulin was so like my own insulin that my body could not tell the difference after it became sensitized to the R-DNA insulin. It wore off after about two weeks, thankfully, but I will never again be able to use injected insulin, because the type of reaction I had does not respond to desensitization therapy.

My daughter is allergic to MSG and Sodium Nitrate, which are chemically similar. She has a "threshold allergy", which means that she can tolerate small amounts, but if she has too much, she can get sensitized, and off she goes, hypersensitive for the next few months, popping out in hives from the least exposure, until it fades out again. The thing is, if she gets sensitized to one, she always gets sensitized to the other at the same time, because her body recognizes them both as the same thing, even though they are distinctly different.

So damage by chemicals to the cells in your body (often in the digestive tract), can trigger an auto-immune response. The longer the damage goes on, the more severe that response gets, eventually making your immune system more and more hypersensitive. This is one reason why doctors know that if you have one auto-immune disease, you are likely to develop others. When my miscarriages were diagnosed, the doctor said, "If you have an auto-immune disease like Crohn's, you probably have arthritis, and other auto-immune diseases as well. And your miscarriages are certainly auto-immune - they fit the pattern exactly. They will get worse, and so will the other diseases as long as you don't treat the auto-immune condition." He was right, I did have arthritis.

There is a certain class of herbs which have been shown to trigger auto-immune flare-ups. Echinacea is one, plus nettles and a few others (I have a list somewhere, can't find it at the moment). They do that because they specifically boost the immune system.

So if you have auto-immune disease, those should be avoided, and you should use anti-inflammatory, healing, and immune suppressant herbs instead (the last class can be fairly difficult to use safely - Hydrangea Root Extract seems to be the safest, as it seems to target a specific class of T-cells responsible for auto-immune responses, and not the whole immune system). You can also use low dose antibiotic or antiseptic herbs, which function as an immune inhibitor in VERY low doses (like a quarter or less of the recommended dose).

My Crohn's went from severe (I could tolerate only 10 specific foods and still had constant pain and malnutrition symptoms), to under control and making steady progress, from using a combination of those kinds of herbs, plus using low dose caffeine as an immune suppressant. Yeah, it works, but the side effects are pretty harsh. But that's the only reason I'm pregnant now and staying pregnant - I had auto-immune miscarriages for six years, but seem to be holding onto this one.

It took ONE WEEK to feel an astonishing difference - exercise induced asthma and muscle pain was GONE, and the number of foods I could tolerate tripled within that week.

I also avoid all irritants that contributed to the cause of the Crohn's in the first place - that means NO chemicals on or in my foods, no soy, no hormones or antibiotics in my foods, etc. Even organics are not clean enough sometimes.

But I'm getting well, and this baby is living, and that is worth any price, and any amount of difficulty.