Among the welcome signs of early Spring, among the sound of the red-winged blackbird, and the sight of the American robin, is the emergence of the stinging nettles on the property. They are small and unobtrustive at this point, but will be good eating when they get a bit taller.
Nettles have a high protein content, so their emergence in the early Spring was fortuitous for our forebears, who needed nutritious foodstuffs after a Winter of preserved foods... if they were lucky.
Back in 2020, when grocery shelves were bare (one night, the only stuff in the entire frozen food aisle at Stop-and-Shop were bags of okra, necessitating Gumbo Week), the one thought that kept me going was 'you just have to hold out for nettle season'. Once the nettles came up, the bare grocery shelves didn't loom so large.
It helps that nettles are delicious, and, once parboiled to remove the 'sting', can be used for any applications that one would use spinach or kale for. Even better, the emergence of the nettles is the harbinger of other plants emerging- the lambs quarters, the pokeweed... the promise of greater bounty.
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