Why You Need More Nettles in your Vegetable Garden | The Incredibly Useful Permaculture Plant

hello and a very warm welcome back to the garden and in this video we're talking all about nettles and nettles are known as a bit of a weed and a weed is simply something which isn't meant to be grown in a specific area but actually nettles are one of the most useful and productive plants that you can grow in your vegetable garden and very often they're one of the easiest plants to grow as well so stay tuned for seven reasons why you should be growing more nettles in your garden the first reason why you want more nettles in your garden is because a feds love them and this is really important so if you're growing something for example tomatoes which are known to have a food issues then instead of the aphids being on the tomatoes of which I haven't seen one on any of these leaves there were lots of aphids here though on the Nettles so I'd rather the aphids be on the Nettles than the tomatoes and if you growing anything else perhaps outside in your garden that you've seen suffer from a food problems then next year try and grow them close to where nettles grow and hopefully the aphids will move away from those plants into the Nettles I think every vegetable garden needs to have a wild patch of nettles like this dedicated exclusively for beneficial insects the first one are ladybird ladybird love nettles because that's where they're going to find a fit and if they can breed and populate in and around nettles then that's going to be so beneficial for the rest of your garden but ladybirds not the only beneficial insect that love Nestle's in fact there are many butterflies that they're caterpillars rely on nettles as their food source for example Red Admiral small tortoiseshell peacock and the comma and these butterflies are also pollinators which is another thing that you need for your garden not just for your vegetable garden but also if you're growing flowers as well if you want to grow a patch of nettles to encourage an attract and help beneficial insects for the garden the only thing that you've got to do is just leave the to their own devices don't come in or cut them back just leave it all through the year did you know that Nettles are actually a superfood so by growing Nettles you can actually be growing another edible crop and the great thing about Nettles is that it doesn't take much effort to grow a lot of them so nettles contain a lot of vitamins you got vitamins A C K and a lot of B vitamins it's also high in iron and in calcium and if you have a hundred grams of blanched nettle leaves that'll give you around 25% of your daily fiber needs when you're looking for nettles to eat try and pick the young tender nettles it says when they're all green even the stem and that's really important and go for the tips these are the most tender and they're not stringy unlike older Nettles and the most nutritious part of them all are the seeds and the seeds contains vitamin E and also essential fatty acids which are really good for your skin and for your brain so what you can do is collect the nettle seeds and have about a teaspoon a day and that's just really going to help give a nice boost of nutrition and I'm going to be collecting a lot of nettle seeds over the next few weeks just for that purpose nettles have a different news which might or might not be useful for you but they're a good indicator of moist and rich soils so this area is a prime example the moisture comes from being almost in constant shade from the Sycamore trees and richness because we do add quite a bit of compost around here and we add a lot of compost around these soft fruit but we also get the fall of the leaves that then we don't clear this during the autumn but these also break down as a as a mulch every single year so perhaps if you have a bigger area of land and you're looking for plants that like moist but rich soil conditions then wherever stinging nettles are growing you can plant those they're a popular permaculture method to build healthy soil it's called chop and drop but they isn't always possible so what I'm doing is a chop move and drop of nettles nettles are very high in nitrogen and also in potassium and potassium is very important if you have fruiting plants whether there's a tomatoes or software like red currants and so wine doing as I'm using a scythe this has a ditch blade rather than a meadow blades and I'm collecting all of these nettles to then move and use as a green mulch around a lot of the perennial fruits so I'm just going to collect these move it give them a mulch and this is a great way to add a bit more fertility into the soil because Nettles hold so much goodness for plants you don't have to stick with just the chop and drop you can also make liquid feeds and in fact you can use Nestle's just by themselves but you can throw in Dolly's dandelions thistles grass clippings any kind of weed or waste material and I'm just gonna place it in the bucket like this and then you want to fill it with water just to the top then once it's filled up near the top you can use something like a log or a stone just to weigh it down put the lid over it leave it for a couple of weeks perhaps longer and it's going to smell quite badly but once it's finished you can then strain it just using an old cloth or an old sheet and then apply it to your plants now the great thing about Nettles is that they are high in manganese and also calcium so if you see any plant deficiencies from those any deficiencies and manganese or calcium then you can apply this liquid feed to help resolve that and the seventh useful metals is to use it as a compost ingredient so I've got these nettles here now preferably you'd want to use younger nettles that haven't gone to seed otherwise you might be spreading nestle seed around but then again you might want to after watching this video but I'm actually making a dirty compost bin so I don't mind if the seeds get in nettles are such a powerful compost ingredient as well as other things like docks and comfrey so if you can ever have the opportunity to place them in your compost bin it's going to make huge improvements and add a lot of those macro and micro nutrients that your soil needs to be healthy if you find yourself in the rare position where you struggle to grow nettles or you have a small garden and you want to grow a patch of them then the easiest thing to do is to find a nettle that has gone to seed like this one and just prepare a patch of ground now all I did was pour some alder compost and their bits of stones and all sorts just prepare it and then grab this shake it around and shake the seeds around you can check the whole nettle on and then cover it very lightly with a bit of compost like that and that is all you need to do alternatively you can collect nettle seeds and store them and then sow them the following spring either in your raised beds or in containers and cover these with a very light layer of soil or compost and hopefully you'll have little nettles appear shortly a bonus useful nettles is making nettle tea which is highly nutritious so just pick the young fresh shoots put them in a mug and cover it with boiling water and you might want to put a bit of honey into that and it's a lovely drink refreshing drink to have in the garden and I hope that this video has given you a nice idea of all the uses and benefits the nettles have and how much of a powerful permaculture plant it is and I just want to give a little shout out to the permaculture magazine and yes that's me on the cover but this magazine covers loads of amazing ways have been able to grow food using natural methods as well as very inspiring stories from food growing projects around the world so if you want to check it out there's a link down below in the description if you found this video helpful then you may be interested to check out the video that I recently did about intercropping and this is how you can grow more food in less space and also realize some amazing benefits so thank you once again for watching and I'll see you again good bye

Channel: Huw Richards

Views: 302,511

Keywords: permaculture gardening, permaculture, nettles, organic gardening, vegetable gardening, permaculture magazine, self sufficiency, homegrown, allotment, garden tips, useful weeds, permaculture tips, stinging nettles

Id: lkUmwlJ5RQ8

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020