HARVEST NETTLES - WITH ARMS FULL OF LOVE!

August - September 2021

When you read old sources, it usually says that nettles are harvested with a sickle or scythe and treated more or less like flax. But there are also sources that say that nettles were treated much like flax and were harvested by the root. The idea for this project was to harvest by the root, but I will not do this in the future.

CLOTHING

Rubber boots are good to wear when wading in nettles. Otherwise, I had work gloves, a long-sleeved shirt and - perhaps most importantly - a thick apron that covered my hips and thighs; I collected large nettles (bundles) that I held close to my hips and then avoided getting burned.

Standing in steep, sunny ravines among a mass of nettles feels incredibly good but is incredibly hot. My skin got hot, hotter than sweaty hot or tired hot. Could it be that there are masses of small stinging hairs blowing in the air when you harvest? All the pockets and folds of my clothes quickly became full of soil and dust, probably because I was harvesting with roots. I therefore drank a lot of water. I also brought a cloth in a plastic zip-lock bag to wipe away all the nettle hairs that stuck to my sweat. Small details that were crucial to how long I could work per day. 

HARVESTING TIME AND WEATHER

The time is right for harvesting when there are 2-3 leaves that start to bend or turn yellow. According to the Trøndelag (Mid Norway) calendar, nettles should be harvested in late August and early September. This is also the time when other agricultural crops are harvested. It should be possible to harvest as long as there are green leaves. Even if the plants are in the same place, there can be a big difference in terms of length, shape of the stem and color.

It is important, yes, absolutely essential, that it is dry and nice weather when you harvest. If wet stems are put together into bundles, you can get mold and rot from the inside, which destroys the fiber. But if, on the other hand, some rain falls on the bundles that are hanging to dry, the water will run down and spread some of the soil bacteria throughout the plants. This is good, especially if you root in a bathtub. Sometimes I had to harvest even when there was no sun, but then I neglected to gather the stems into bundles before they had had a proper dry time. WEATHER has generally proven to be essential in almost all processes.

GROWING LOCATIONS

Photo Fride Kramer Riseng. Ravines in Sylling

I mainly harvested in Sylling in Lier, but also traveled to Fjellstrand in Nesodden where my lovely Aase has a fantastic "nettle field"; This was a large nettle meadow, surrounded by forest and some garden. Sylling's landscape consists of steep ravines that were sunny at the top and shaded at the bottom. One would think higher powers had pushed the landscape together like a soft cloth folded in tight folds. The ravines have mysterious and beautiful shadow landscapes, at times they are reminiscent of Jurassic Park with its streams and lush rainforest fauna. I also got nettle from Aud Harstad Bakken and kind people in Husfliden. Some of these nettles were shorter than 120 cm and also had branches. I will come back to these under the subject of preparation.

THE PLANT

The aim is to get stems as long as possible (120 - 150 cm), but not too thick. Between 5-8 mm width is fine. The number of fibers remains the same, so with thick stems you get more wood and a lot more work during preparation. NB! It doesn't matter if there is powdery mildew on some plants, but if the whole field is down they cannot be used.

The stems in Trøndelag are thinner than the ones I harvest in Eastern Norway. This may have to do with the amount of nitrogen in the soil and the type of soil. Lier has sandy soil, while in Trøndelag it is more clayey soil.

HARVESTING WITH ROOTS

Keep pulling around the bottom of the stem so that a piece of root and a little soil is included. A general rule with plants is that you should never harvest everything at once, but leave about half for next year.

The reason for harvesting with roots should be:

1. When cutting the stem, bacteria and fungi will damage the fiber

2. Get the maximum amount of fiber.

3. The soil bacteria that come with the roots should be good for the retting. When the stalks are harvested in the open air, the soil and water will mix downwards in the stalk and thus become part of the decomposition.

BUNDLES AND BENNILD

The nettles were harvested and gathered in bundles, each with about 40 stems with the root facing up. The reason for this number is the circumference of the nettle when it is dried and shed. The nettle should have the same circumference as the wrist of the person breaking the bundles. In the old days, this was most often men. The plants had leaves, roots and soil. Each nettle was tied together with a “bennild”, a kind of "rope" that you make by twisting 5 - 6 nettles that are tied tightly around the nettle. When the ends meet, they are also twisted into a tight tail that is pushed into the middle of the nettle as if you were sitting on a ski lift. Imagine the nettle as a Y hanging upside down. (In the film here I show how to make nettles, but it was at its shortest. I recommend using slightly longer nettles as "ropes".

HOW MUCH SHOULD I HARVEST?

None of us knew how much fiber I would be left with per plant. This "farm industry" was supposed to both provide more fiber and be far more efficient than working with one plant at a time. We therefore took as a starting point the amount of thread I usually have left when I work with individual plants; about 4 m of single thread per plant. This in turn was to be spun into double thread. The estimated amount of thread per bundle was therefore 80 meters of double thread per skein. We settled on harvesting 300 skeins. That would give 24,000 m of double thread for warp and weft and would be enough for a small children's garment.

Due to large material losses (read a separate section about this), I harvested another 4,200 the next year. In addition, Aud and I harvested 2,000 nettles for Aud after the first frost night. Although these 2000 were not included in the project, they turned out to be so interesting that they are still discussed in the chapters on retting and preparation.

MOVING THE NETTLES FROM THE HARVESTING PLACE

I had tarpaulins that were long enough for the nettles to be wrapped diagonally. When I had about 8-10 pieces per tarpaulin, I rolled the tarpaulin into a thick "cigar" and carried it to the car, an Outlander with a large cargo space. This "cigar" was clever, because it didn't take anything for the nettles to break. Gathering them together like this made the whole thing safer for the plant.

EXPERIENCES FROM THE HARVEST

Harvesting with roots

Industrialized nettle fields grow the plants in rows so that the machines don't damage the roots. Most old sources in Norway mention harvesting nettles with a sickle or scythe, but there are exceptions where it is said that nettles were harvested by the root or "in the same way as flax", which I assume means by the root, since the plant is pulled up by the root and replanted every year. During the large national nettle collections during World War I, posters were put up calling for nettles to be collected for fiber and food. These posters could have 12 "commandments" with rules for harvesting, of which caring for the root was one of them.

Latvian research shows that it takes 3 years before the fiber is suitable for textile. This means that you get plants that may have poorer quality fiber when you harvest. If you gain a few centimeters of fiber in the root, this seems stupid considering that you lose the fiber in the entire plant for three years to come. In addition, a lot of time is spent hammering and breaking the root, so I gradually started cutting off the pieces of root. 

The advantage of pulling up the plant by the roots is that it is quick. It is also easier to get it to hang on hedges when there is a "crown" on top of the roots that are entwined. In some places I was given free access to nettles, in exchange for pulling up by the roots in the hope of getting rid of the plants. 

Timing

Before the plants are taken in to dry in the barn, they should be so dry that they are brown and crispy. They should rustle when you touch them. I will come back to this drying issue later when I write about preparation in 2023.

When you harvest as late as the beginning of September, my experience was that it was at the latest. You get humidity and both years (2021 and 2022) there was a lot of rain. In the future, I assume that I will harvest no later than mid-August, unless I can harvest outdoors with shelter from the rain. But what did they do in the old days? There was rain and humidity too then. 

Harvest earlier, get finer fiber?

The advantage of harvesting late is that the fiber is stronger. On the other hand, you can make fiber as early as July, and something I will look at in the summer of 2024 is whether the time of harvest can have anything to do with the quality of the thread. For example, is it possible that the fine, white thread, the "muslin, the poor man's silk" was from fiber harvested earlier in the summer? 

Number of nettles per bundle

The number of nettles per bundle should be the circumference of the wrist of the person making the noise. In the old days, this was a man's job. We collected 40 nettles per bundle, but in the future I will probably go down to 30.