Apocalypse-Grade Permaculture, part 4 - Nettles
Survive collapse by engineering your landscape to produce food automatically.
This is another installment in a multipart series that is geared toward permaculture for preppers and survivalists. If you are new to the series, it is probably helpful to go back and read part one first.
Part 4 - Nettles:
When Stalin forced the collectivization of Soviet farmland beginning in the late 1920s, millions of small farmers resisted this outrageous confiscation. So the communists destroyed their crops. Many farmers starved to death. But I am told that Grigoriy Zinchenko, in his book Escape From Buchenwald, relates how some of the farmers were saved from death, when the wild nettles emerged in spring.
Nettles, when dried, have an astonishing 25% protein, which is more than most beans.1 Of course it is generally more common to eat them fresh, in which case the the protein percentage by weight is much lower. Stinging nettle is widely considered a superfood, and is a huge favorite among the foraging community. (Some argue that it is one of the most nutritious greens on the planet). But it can also be cultivated very easily, and is a really good fit for almost any survival permaculture setup.
Here are six reasons why:
One - Stealth: Yes, they are very popular among foragers, but among the general public, almost nobody knows that nettles are edible. Your storable food or your garden vegetables could get stolen. But people are not likely to steal something if they don’t even know it is valuable.
Or, some bad actor might attempt to wipe out your food supply intentionally. But nettles are hard to wipe out. If you burn them down, they will come right back up the next year - or even in some cases the very same year.
Two - Storability: If you have access to sunshine, then you can dry nettle leaves. If they are thoroughly dry, and stored in a dry place, they should last for twelve months. So if you have more than you can eat, it is definitely a good idea sun-dry your surplus, and set them aside for lean times.
Three - Easy to grow: Yes, they grow wild, but if you don’t happen to have some right where you live, they can be easily cultivated. I started experimenting with growing nettles two years ago. I found someone who had a large patch growing wild, and got permission to dig some up. I transplanted to compost-enriched ground, and they established immediately.
Four - Easy to cook: Just boil or steam them for a few minutes, and the stingers are deactivated, and you have made yourself an exceedingly healthy meal. They can be cooked either fresh or dried.
Five - Multipurpose - food, fiber, and medicine all in one plant: Nettle can be made into a fiber similar to linen. Here is a link that explains it. It also has a long history as a medicinal. It has been used to treat inflammation, and high blood pressure, among many other things.
Six - Quick reward, long payoff: Just like j-chokes, you can start harvesting in year two. In favorable conditions, nettles should persist on their own for decades.
Growing tips: There are actually two distinct species of nettle. The more commonly known variety is the stinging nettle. The lesser known species is the wood nettle. They are so similar that they are often confused with each other, even by experts. The ever-knowledgeable Samuel Thayer details all of the major distinctions in his Forager’s Harvest. But for our purposes, the most important distinction is that wood nettle prefers shade, and stinging nettle prefers full sun. But both are fantastic for survival permaculture, so if you have both sun and shade on your property, grow both.
Nettles want a moist, rich soil. So add as much organic matter as you can get your hands on: Wood chips, spoiled hay, compost, and especially manure; either from cows or horses, or whatever you can get.
Nettles are considered by many to be a noxious weed. That is a good thing. That means the life force runs strong them, which is exactly what we should be looking for in a food source. I recommend planting small patches of nettle throughout your property. It spreads via rhizome, just like jerusalem artichoke. So if you create favorable conditions, it should spread itself. My favorite way to do that is to spread either cow or horse manure thickly on the soil all around it.
Now some people have grave concerns about animal manure, due to residues from herbicides, dewormers, antibiotics, etc. I totally get those concerns, but I still think the tradeoff is worth it. We are playing a long game here. Those nasty residues disappear over time. If you keep a permanent plant cover on your soil, then the added richness will still be there, after the residues are long gone.
Deer Protection: Similar to almost everything else, new nettle plantings need deer protection. I learned that the hard way, as usual. Set some four-foot diameter fence rings around them for the first two years or so.
Harvesting: I defer once again to Thayer, as the most knowledgeable person that I know of on this subject. He tells us that stinging nettles can be harvested in early spring as soon as they emerge, through to late spring, when they start to get too fibrous to have a great food value. The growing tips are the most tender, and make the best eating. As spring progresses to summer, the tender part gradually shrinks until it disappears.
Wood nettles emerge slightly later, and retain their tenderness a bit longer, than stinging nettles. A lot of this has to with sun - nettles that are in direct sun will get stringier faster, than those that are in part shade, or full shade.
With both species we have a harvest window that lasts for at least a couple of months. Yet even out of season, say in late summer or fall, they can probably still be eaten in an emergency.
Yield: The province of Manitoba reports an astonishing 17,400 pounds per acre.2 But that is when it is being grown for fiber or biomass, not for food. In this scenario the entire plant is harvested, not just the tender tops. I have not found any detailed information on yield when it is harvested expressly for edibility. I also have not yet studied the yield on my own place.
But I think we can safely say that the potential edible yield is very large. We can say this because nettles often grow in fairly dense patches, and the same plants can be harvested many times over the course of two or three months, each year. We can collect a bunch of tender growing tips, then come back to the same patch a few weeks later, and do the same thing again.
Range and hardiness: Nettles are hardy in USDA climate zones 3 through 10. They grow in most of North America, from Mexico to Canada, from the East Coast to the West Coast, anywhere that soil is moist and rich. I want to emphasize, if your soil is not naturally rich don’t let this stop you from trying your hand at nettles. At this moment in time we have at our disposal many economical ways to enrich soil. In most areas of the US, we can get free or cheap wood chips, free or cheap animal manure, food scraps, spoiled hay pond muck, and low-price municipal compost. All of these things can turn a poor soil into a rich one.
Design considerations: You should definitely grow both nettles and Jerusalem artichokes in your apocalypse-permaculture system. But you probably shouldn’t grow then right next to each other. this is because I am pretty sure that the j-chokes would overrun the nettles. Now I haven’t actually carried out this experiment to see if my opinion is true, but I do have both of these plants growing within about fifty feet of one-another. I can observe that both are very resilient. But when I look at how j-chokes expand so densely and inexorably, I think that very few herbaceous plants could resist them head-on. By the way, an herbaceous plant is a plant with no woody stem - a plant that dies back to ground level in the fall. Basically, if it is not a tree or a bush, it is herbaceous.
Nettles are probably best grown in meadows or along forest edges, or water edges - anywhere that is fairly moist. I haven’t tried this yet, but since but I have often thought they would make a nice underplanting for fruit and nut trees. They tolerate shade very well, and in a hot climate, they might actually do better in the shade of a fruit tree, as it would be slightly moister there.
Yes, I understand this would entail a certain inconvenience, as one would have to wear long pants and a long sleeve shirt when harvesting or maintaining the trees. But you would also double your per/area food production; you would get two food crops out of the same patch of ground. Plus, on that same patch of ground, you would be spreading out your production in the temporal plane: You would get a nettle harvest in the spring, and a fruit or nut harvest in the summer or fall. Now, if you have unlimited acreage, this might not be a big deal to you. But most of us are working with space constraints.
Conclusion: Here is a summation of what makes nettles an excellent survival permaculture crop: It is an edible green that is very high in protein. It is exceptionally valuable as a nutrient-dense food, yet few people recognize it as food. It is useful in several ways: as a fresh food, a storage food, a medicine, and a fiber. It can grow along side of, or underneath, other food crops. Finally, it is easy to establish but hard to kill.
https://wildfoodsandmedicines.com/nettle-restorative-food-purifying-medicine-guardian/
https://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/crops/crop-management/print,stinging-nettle.html