Cormac MacConnell: Check your garden for tasty organic treat
The price tag said that I could purchase a large plastic bag of large and angry-looking nettles for a special offer of just under two euros.
Nettles for sale! The mind boggles. Needless to say, I did not add the stingers to my trolley. If I want a plate of nettles, I don’t have to pay that kind of money for them.
All I have to do is visit the wildest corner of my own back garden, where there is about two hundred euros worth of the finest of young nettles bobbing and weaving under the sun. I should chop them down, wash them, and sell them to the supermarket myself, at a real giveaway price.
Amazingly enough, when I was looking at the plasticated supermarket nettles the other afternoon, they were walking off the shelf.
Two young housewives, and one man, bought them the minute they saw them, and walked away looking happy.
I understand fully we are now living in an era when all manner of organic growths once regarded as weeds are on the menu of vegans and others of that ilk, God bless them all, but this was the first time I had seen nettles for sale. Fair play to the person who was entrepreneurial enough to wholesale them to the supermarket, is what I say.
Thinking later about the incident, I remembered that I had once eaten nettles myself.
It happened in a friend’s home, outside Cahir, about 30 years ago. They had been boiled, and were served with chicken and potatoes and gravy, and they tasted almost exactly like spinach. They added piquancy to a splendid dinner, and all the stinging power had been lost during the cooking.
The experience in Tipperary was infinitely more pleasant than my first encounter with nettles being used as a healing remedy, when I was a boy.
What had happened then was that I had been in contact with a farm fence, and had contracted a patch of ringworm — then common in country life — on the skin of the calf of my right leg.
For whatever reason, it did not disappear when treated with the ointment prescribed by the family doctor, so my mother took me to the home of a lady known to have folk remedies for a wide range of ailments.
Our country had many of those healers back then. I was about ten years old at the time, and will never forget that evening. And that for sure is the truth.
First, the healer observed my leg closely. She then handed me a clean jam jar, and told me to go outside and pee in it, and bring the jar back to her. I brought the (warm) jar back to her in a few minutes.
She told me to go out and take off my sandal. I was wearing short trousers, like all boys back then.
She had a small towel in her hand. She walked down her garden and came back with something in the towel.
She took the jar of pee from me, poured it down over my leg, and then wrapped the towel instantly around my wet limb, and I screamed holy murder, because that towel was lined with strong young nettles, infuriated at being ripped up from their home under the hedge.
Mortal agony! It took the two women to hold me back for the next five minutes or so.
That was certainly the worst pain I had ever suffered until then.
There was no question of the healer accepting payment for her ministrations either. My mother had brought a currant cake and a bottle of sherry with her. My leg was very painful for hours but, in truth, the ringworm was cleared away before the weekend, without leaving a scar either.
While we are in that alternative healing zone, I also recall spraining my right wrist rather badly, maybe the following year.
This time, there was no external healer or doctor involved at all. My father went to the lough, caught an eel, skinned it before it went on the pan, and wound the skin around my wrist.
There was an immediate easing of the pain, but the negative of this process was that I had to wear the uncovered eelskin around my wrist for a full seven days, and by then I stank to high heaven.
Some folk drink nettle tea, I believe, and there is also nettle soup, and probably a whole range of other edibles and drinkables I know naught of.
An element in a summer salad? But would your tongue get stung? And could you ease the pain of that by using the dock leaves we used apply to the stings you could not avoid getting when playing outdoors in the summers of long ago?
For all I know, dock leaves are edible as well.
Maybe the moral of this yarn for those of you who are enterprising and have a good crop of nettles under the hedges is that there is a market out there for them, as long as they are washed and safely encased in plastic bags.
