One of the things I love most about living in Lund is that there is so much wild landscape and so little of things like concrete and street lights.
Because of that, what happens in the wild world takes a big role in our lives out here, and when the seasons change our lives change with them. The past couple of weeks, everybody has been talking about spring.
For myself, I know it’s spring the first day that I can eat nettles. I’ve been watching my secret patch for a while now, and this past weekend I finally got to pick the first nettles of the season. Gathering the juicy tops carefully into a bag, I closed my eyes and breathed in the sweet, green scent that floated up from the cut stems. The smell of spring. The first taste of nettles is how my body knows that we made it through the winter.
The stinging nettle, urtica dioica in Latin, known in the Tla’amin Nation language of Ay-ah-ju-thum as sewšew (sounds like “sue sue” to English-speaking ears), grows in damp places with partial shade, such as under alder trees and at the edges of the forest or the banks of streams.
The plants are covered with small hairs that break off if you touch them the wrong way and release a mixture of chemicals that sting your skin. Despite their thorny exterior, like a lot of people who live out in the woods, nettles are actually pretty friendly, as long as you approach them respectfully.
If you get careless or handle them roughly, they’ll give you a good sting, but if you value them for being just the way they are, they’ll always be there for you when you need them.
Steamed or boiled or made into tea, sewšew are packed with all the nutrients we need after a long, gray winter.
So many of us live out here in Lund because we want to eat from our gardens and from the garden of forest that is all around us, instead of just from the grocery store, which means that our diet is just as seasonal and connected to the land around us as the rest of our lives.
The first nettles are precious to us all, and I love the shared excitement that we all feel when they finally come out. “I picked nettles yesterday!” is an important piece of news to share in the post office on a Monday morning, and that says a lot about Lund and the people who live here.
The way that people in this community value our wild food sources, and know enough about them and the landscape we share with them to make them a topic of conversation, is a pretty special thing. It’s something that brings us together, a joy that we all share.
Just don’t ask anybody to tell you where their patch is; that’s a secret that we keep for ourselves.
