Old Growth Nettles
When we bought our 7 acres and its accompanying shack back in 1977, we first saw the place at night. The smell of cookies baking in a 1920’s Majestic wood stove, the soft glow of oil lamps, a fire crackling in the parlor stove — sure, I thought I’d died and gone to Hippie Heaven. A thought that evaporated by daylight the day we signed the paperwork, at least for the mizzus who sat herself in a corner of the vacated shack and cried her eyes out.
What we didn’t discover until spring was a clearcut woods that by May was an impenetrable jungle of stinging nettles 7 feet high. These days they’d qualify for required disclosure on real estate forms, same as contaminated wells, leaking roofs, buckling foundations and black mold behind the walls. Trails had to be cleared constantly just to enter the dreaded stinging domain and we were constantly struck by toppled nettles that penetrated even the thickest dungarees.
In some parts of the country, pioneers dealt with predators, arctic winters, poisonous snakes and insects, dust storms, hurricanes and hostile natives. So if my curse was only hostile neighbors and stinging nettles, I counted myself semi-lucky. You can eat nettles and I’ve made nettle beer with the itching bastards. The hostile neighbors, well, we had our differences. And still do. But there’s never been any violence. So far.
For 30 years I made my peace. With both. But awhile back I decided enough was really enough! One spring I took a sickle and cleared acre after acre of these monsters. And when they sprang right back up, I hit em again. And again. Each spring I attack the fresh recruits with extreme prejudice … and each spring less and less of them come back. The cedar and fir seedlings I plant now have sunlight reaching them where earlier they withered and died beneath a dark canopy of nettles.
The old growths are gone now, just a few stumps, a memory of early times here on the South End of the island, a myth maybe to the neighbors with their weed’n’feed manicured lawns. But when I’m gone and my sickle hung up for good, little doubt in my mind the roots of these stingers, patient all these many years, will return with a vengeance. I wish em luck…. The neighbors, I mean.
Tags: Kingdom of Nettles, Nettle Jungle, Old Growth Nettles