Cardboard. Layers. Nettle.

Travel

15 Mar

15 March

Nettles are the first green food to appear in spring here. One day there’s a flat field of the old stiff stalks and upended blackberry that was dug out of the patch, the next day there’s a fuzz of green catching the slanting sun. By June this patch will be waist high. For now we pinch off the dense dark green tips using gloves. I fill a bag which I will later dump into a colander for a quick wash, then straight into a pot of well-salted boiling water. After blanching for one minute the nettles no longer sting. Strain them, squeeze them out thoroughly ending up with little tight packed green handfuls. Chop these and sauté the greens in garlic butter to eat as is. Or add to onions stewed in butter and salt, then cover with water or chicken stock, simmer briefly and purée into a smooth emerald soup. This is deep nutrition after a winter of meat, stored vegetables, and brassica greens.

Nettles run across fields, under and through everything else growing there. They send out pale underground shoots that quickly root down and sprout upward. I started my patch intentionally from biodynamic nettle seed. Some would say I’m mad. But if you manage nettles their benefits outweigh their insidiousness. At this time of year it’s easy to lift and pull up runners that are heading into areas where you don’t want them. Each runner can be transplanted elsewhere if you or a friend should want to start a nettle patch. Or they can be buried in a deep hot compost heap. Or put to steep in a bucket or barrel of water where they will die and turn into liquid feed for garden plants. Nettles are Dynamic Accumulators. They bring a great diversity of minerals and nutrients up from deeper layers of the soil, which accumulate in their leaves. Once released into the water, or rotted down in compost, they feed other plants. Waist-high nettles in summer I consistently mow down to add a deep fibrous, nutritious layer to my compost pile. Some people put up nettle hay for animal feed in winter. I often dry nettle on big bamboo mats to use for tea. It tastes wonderfully rich and vegetal, not unlike green tea, and is rich in iron.

Refurbishing the raspberry terraces the other day I found nettle running beneath my deep cardboard mulch. Here it was easy to lift and rip out the runners. A mulch such as this causes things to rise to the surface. Beneficially it causes earthworms to rise up under the sheltering dark and damp to plow and fertilize the soil for you. Under the deep, light-excluding mulch weeds die, decomposers such as earthworms eat them, pulling the nutrients down into the soil with their tunneling. The soil texture becomes fluffy and conservative of moisture. Even the nettles wouldn’t last long under there after I refresh the mulch.

Cardboard mulching looks like this: Over the grass, weeds and old shreds of mulch, I mat down the largest sheets of cardboard I can collect. From the winery this is easy, we usually have a pile of 4’x4’ pieces from bottle packaging. Smaller pieces can be patched together, but cracks increase the chance of light getting through. At first it looks like a mistake, like the recycling got blown out across the lawn. But then I sift over a 4-6 inch cross hatching of old hay or straw and weigh the whole thing down with rocks or logs, especially around the edges and overlaps. After a good rain the mulch settles, after a few weeks it’s integrated into the landscape, in this case tucked in around raspberry bushes. By six months it has almost disappeared. Cardboard is a fine carbon addition to soil and gets gradually eaten by earthworms. This is also a great way to establish a new bed by simply punching through and putting in seed potatoes.

This layering of the old and the new, laying in food for the next year’s plant growth— perhaps a dusting of wood ash for potash, some compost around the raspberries — adding a few new plants plugged in through the mulch — is a satisfying process. You are weeding, and feeding, and tucking in, and cycling nutrients all in one.

Sometimes life is like this striated accumulation of old and new, of raw spots that need a bandage, of deep spots that need excavating, of the new just cropping up. Sometimes the layers get too perforated or stripped away and need to be renewed entirely. Or nettles have sneaked through underneath, threatening take-over. But working quietly, patching and layering, you reestablish the proper order and balance, allowing new life to take hold and find a measure of peace.