The particulars
Season
April–June
Picked
By hand, in long gloves
Tastes of
Cut grass, spinach, wet stone
Field notes
Nettles grow wherever the soil is rich and nobody has got round to tidying: the edges of pasture, the damp side of a stone wall, the bank behind the old dairy. Ours come from three farms within a twenty-minute drive of the workshop, all of them unsprayed, none of them planted on purpose.
We pick from April to the middle of June, taking only the top four leaves of each stem before the plant flowers. After that the leaves turn coarse and the flavour goes flat. Pickers wear gloves to the elbow and still complain.
The leaves are rinsed, then steeped in cold spring water for eighteen hours, which takes the sting out. Nothing is heated. The infusion comes out the colour of a pond in good health and tastes, reassuringly, of very little else we could name.
