Fun to read through your post @minismallholding and picture you enjoying the outbreak of nice Spring weather. While here in the high country? We may have another 2 to 3 weeks, if we are fortunate, before the first frost. How this "virtual world" makes the real world seem so much smaller ...
The nettles were intriguing to me, as they look very similar to what we find here in the wild near water. We call them stinging nettles. Why? Because they will definitely leaving you with a very unpleasant stinging sensation, if you brush up against them!
In my youth, as a Boy Scout, I passed the requirements for many of what were then called Merit Badges. One of them was for edible plants, which we passed by both identifying and then eating plants found in the mountains. One of mine was stinging nettle. I had found you could boil them in water, pour off the 1st boiled water (which softened the nettles and removed the poison in them), add fresh and boil again. In my memory, they then tasted like a sort of watery spinach ... 🤷♂️
What do you do with your nettles?
Love also to see how well everything is coming up and the rabbits and chickens in there amongst it all. Gotta be good for the soil, all that fertilizer. Great stuff!
Here we have the nicest tomato plants we've ever grown. We attribute this to being in the 3rd year of our "Back to Eden" adventure in gardening which I have posted about in the past. We are also very excited about this being the 2nd year of getting a new asparagus bed going. It looks like a virtual forest right now, so we have high hopes for our next Spring, when we can begin to harvest them! 😋
I hope all is well with you and yours, my friend. What we read and see here about how the "latest round" of COVID restrictions are being handled in Australia is pretty sobering. Not being there "on the ground," we wonder sometimes what is the truth ...
Take care! 👋
They are the very sane stinging nettles that you know so well! 😆 I did some research on them and it seems they've pretty much migrated across the globe as well as we have. Here the summers are too hot for them, so they grow in winter instead.
I generally use them like spinach. They aren't a bad flavour rait, it's just the stings that make them off putting to prepare. I have made a pesto from fresh leaves before as well. Blending deals with the stingers too.
Gosh, has it already been 3 years since you started back to Eden gardening! I recall you looking into it all. That's fantastic it's working so quickly. I can't do it myself due to our curl grub populations which eat the roots of the seedlings if not kept in check. I dig over each season to remove them for the chickens.
Fingers crossed for the asparagus next year. I have a couple of plants and started getting some the last couple of years. I want to make a larger area for some more.
Thankfully things are fairly quiet in my state, but we're on edge hoping that they don't start on us next. What you're seeing abroad is likely pretty accurate. You may even have better reporting on it than us, as a lot of social media tracking and censoring is happening here.
Wow. That surprised me @minismallholding. In all my life, I have never heard of it coming up in someone's yard!? Maybe you actually planted it?! 🤷♂️
Growing up here in the Mountain West, it is mostly all high desert country with little rainfall. So I can't imagine it coming up here "volunteer." Up in the mountains, it grows along streams, where it gets the water it needs. You must live in a much wetter climate than where I have ever lived.
All that said, great to see you make this kind of use of it. You are far braver (more adventurous? 🙂) than I, as I have been stung by the blasted stuff too often to give any serious thought to eating it ... 😉
Yep, the summer of 2019 - the first year of my retirement. I have made mistakes along the way, but I think I have learned how to manage it better and the results are there. We still have a long way to go for it to result in the wonderful soil that you can see on Paul's videos though. He said (if memory serves) that his had been in place for over 25 years. Not sure I'll still be actively gardening that far out. But ... You never know! 🤷♂️
Nice to hear it is quite there. Where we live it is also, but what we see on the news is very sobering. Never thought I would live to see some of what has taken place here in America over the last 1-½ years ...
Our summer was disrupted by contracting COVID-19 ourselves. While on vacation ... 😒😔 At our age, we are in the "high risk" category, but ... We survived it just fine. 👍 Never came remotely close to thinking we would end up going to a hospital.
I didn't plant the nettles, but I don't go out of my way to discourage it. We have two extremes here in SA, blast furnace in summer and a LOT of rain in winter, so the winter is perfect for them. Because some thing's can be so hard to grow, I try to make use of what doesn't mind growing, while I try to improve the growing conditions.
I'm glad to hear you weathered covid well. You must look after yourselves well. I have an aunt and uncle in the UK who had it and were quite sick, while my cousin sailed through it with next to no symptoms. I don't think they ended up in hospital either, though. I'm coming across more people who have had severe reactions to the vaccine... but we can't really talk about that for fear of reprisal...
That makes a lot of sense. What doesn't mind growing around here are dandelions! And we are across the street from a park and there are a lot of trees in our area, so ... We have lots of squirrels (who eat the grapes off of our grapevine ... 😠). We joke that we'll still be good, if things continue to "go south," since we can eat squirrels (I have traps and they can't resist peanuts for "bait" ...) and dandelions! 😂
Well, we are in pretty good shape, all things considered. But we attribute our outcome to not "following the herd over the cliff" ... Strong words I suppose, but that is our view of so much of what we are
told/ "guidance" these days. We were never vaccinated.Our own research turned up the Zelenko protocol, named after a very courageous (in our opinion, given all that he has been put through ...) Jewish doctor (Ukranian immigrant) in New York. Lots more info we came across, in support (one example), but this was the key for us. We thank God for it.
Yep. Up to and including those who have died after having it administered. But ... Who's counting ...
As with so many diseases there seeem to be quite a lot of options with regards treatment. Recently there's been a lot of talk about ivermectin for it as well.
Yes. In our research, we found this listed as "Plan B" (my words), if you could not get access to HCQ. HCQ has been "blacklisted" in many places and is harder to get. While Ivermectin supposedly has easier access and it does have benefit.
I don't know, as we found an "underground" way to get HCQ and is shown to be better.