The Alchemy of Grapes – From Vine to Wine

Hello my friends, it's spring and I'm so excited to be back in the forest with you all to look at another one of our favorite nutritive tonics. Now this is a spring cleansing, spring building, spring revitalizing herb. It's known as Dr. Urtica by many herbalists. Why? Because this is one of those herbs that has a panacea effect on so many health conditions. What is it? It's stinging nettle of course and this one really stings. Watch out but that can be medicine too. All right, let's roll the intro. Every year, nettles is a huge part of my spring diet. This has been one that I've been tuning in for decades now and I just love the way it shows up in all these nitrogenous soils along the edges of riverbanks and all along the outsides of outhouses and manure piles and so much more. It's a protein rich herb but before we connect in with this, before we start harvesting and look at the benefits, we've got to make sure we have the right stuff. You want to have a pair of scissors or a knife or something but you can also snip them with your fingers if you're gentle. You may want to use gloves and it's always good to have an open basket or some kind of harvesting bag. I tend to, when I go around and harvest nettles, I tend to gather enough for the season. I'll put a lot in my freezer and I'll make a lot into dried herb for tea and I'll do a fresh tincture with some of it. I'm going to be collecting today probably a couple of pounds of fresh nettles and then processing it in many different ways. With any plant that we consider an ally and we want to work with as medicine, it's worth taking a bit of time to bring ourselves down to its level and tune in with the vibrational medicine of this. So I'm going to take my jacket off, get a little bit funky with the nettles. Hello nettles. Get a little fluffy with it. Let it grace me. Thank you nettles. You are one of my favorite foods. I just love how you show up. I love the way you bring nutrients into my life. I love all the medicine that you have and I'm just really appreciative of you here. One of my favorite things to do too is take a little tip of nettles, squish it in my fingers, get all the juices going, pop it in my mouth and just take a minute to sit with it. Before we get into looking at how to work with this as medicine, I want to talk about the sting. Actually the sting is part of the medicine and so we're going to kind of unpack what is in this sting. Stinging nettles by any tree planter or any farmer will tell you, oh that's stinging. Stay away from that stuff. But really in that sting is so much medicine. In fact that is some of the best parts of the nettle. So the sting comes from these little stingers on the edges of the leaves and along the stem and it numbs for up to 24 hours. It can be quite a tingly feeling. In fact it can actually even produce a high. One of my favorite things about it is that you get a little bit of high. There's a lot of serotonin in there. There's a lot of formic acid. There's acetylcholine. There's a bunch of other antihistamines. So it opens the bronchioles. It gets you a little bit altered just stinging yourself with nettles. But actually all of these compounds help to work with many health conditions. As a doctor of correspondence we see that nettle sting actually works with sting in the body. But even when it comes to inflammation like arthritis, the sting is something that we can put onto our hands. I know many people who rub their hands or their knees or whatever arthritic part of their body in nettles to help work with it throughout the years. After a few years of stinging yourself with nettles you'll be sure to see quite a difference in how those conditions come out. Even things like gout. I've seen people take this and whack their feet and get the gout out of them. So this is an old old remedy. It's called urtication and you can do it on any, I guess, prolapsed tissue, any tissue that needs invigoration, but also inflamed tissues, right? I tend to like to do it on my wrists and on my joints and my knuckles. And I've seen from people with arthritis that this is the best way to just kind of rub yourself with nettles a little bit, bask in it, and have a good time stinging. Now I mentioned the sting is good for you, but there are ways to grab the nettles with your fingers and not get stung. If you pull your hands right underneath, you can often do it like this. The tips of our fingers are quite strong. Now of course we can use gloves like I mentioned, but I love to just connect with nettles with my bare hands and so I often will harvest them like that. We're going to pull them right above the axles, just like this on the first joint. Now in some cases we might even go down to the second joint, but you can see what I'm trying to do is leave this second joint so that new heads can come out and the plant can still flourish. That's really the basics of picking nettles is getting right above the axles and harvesting just the spring tips. Now when it comes to harvesting too, we don't want to pick them when they're more than like a foot to a foot and a half high. Really what I say is when the seeds start to show, the little flowers start to show, then we know it's out of nettle season. In this early part of the season, these spring tips are still quite nutritive and they don't have any of that quote-unquote anti-herbivore chemistry. Now they're still good when they're a bit bigger, but they can be a little harder on the system. This is a good patch of harvest. You see how I've taken the big ones, I've left the little ones to still grow up and all of the stands, here's an old one that I harvested a little while ago, it's starting to shoot up new baby nettle heads. Once we finish harvesting, this is how the patch should look so that it continues to grow well throughout the years. This is important because we want to keep coming back to the same places and see more abundance year after year. Nettles are a rhizome that divides by root division, so as I kind of get in here, you can see down here as they kind of trail on, they're all part of the same plant. So here's a little nettle root. This is what we might use as more of that testosterone enhancing aspect of the nettles, and this part can be tinctured as well as a fresh root, cleaned up of course, or dried and made into a tea. But really, these roots are how they kind of pass all the way along, and this would normally be harvested in the fall, not here in the spring. So now that we have our basket full of nettles, what are we going to do with them? These can be bunched like so, you can hang them. I like to hang them with elastic bands so that it tightens as they dry, and you can dry them that way, put them on screens for making tea. If we're going to do food, we're going to chop them and process them by steaming them. Then I might turn them into like a nettle spanakopita, or my favorite is nettle tortilla pie, where I layer in beans and cheese and salsa and nettles and make a tortilla stack like a lasagna. Amazing, super delicious. Or if we're going to make them into a medicine for our body to take internally that's a little more potent, we're going to want to make a fresh tincture. It's best to do that right while you have fresh nettles because the formic acid and some of the compounds in there are going to denature within three, four, five hours, you're going to lose some of that. So I'll typically chop this up and then I'll put it in 75% alcohol, shake that up for a couple of weeks, and then you've got a beautiful tincture you can filter out and start to use two to three droppers full twice a day, or as a tea we're going to use maybe three cups a day. So food, tea, or tincture, maybe even juice, because I do like me some nettle juice. So you may have noticed this dapper vest I'm wearing, guess what it's made out of? Nettles. This plant has one of those plants that's been used to make linens and cloths for a long time. In fact, they've even found in China 2,000 year old grave sites. They've dug up and found the most beautiful linens. It's quite a bit stronger and more robust than cotton. There's a lot of interesting things around that, but it can also be made into twine. And what you would do, I'm going to grab a big one here, is when they get bigger, they pull down and use all of these kind of tough cordage, and you can start to braid these and bind these and make cordage, but also as it gets older, these can strip apart and you can make really great materials with it. This is a classic in how a lot of clothes were made back in the medieval days, was with nettles. And they last a lot longer, they're stronger. I've had this now for a good 10 years now, maybe even longer than that, and it's still in great condition. So you may want to look into this as a use of nettles is how do I make my own materials that last quite a bit longer? Let's take a minute to look at some of the health benefits of nettle. Now, this is a really impressive plant. It's got a lot of vitamin C, it's high in B vitamins, it's got vitamin K in it, but it also has a ton of minerals. It's got iron, calcium, potassium, magnesium, just a ton of that. Plus, it's also got some essential fatty acids in it. It's got a lot of antioxidants, quercetin, antihistamines, so much more. One of the more interesting things though, is it's the most heavy amount of protein in any vegetable here on the West Coast and in this part of the world, in the temperate regions, nettle is the most protein rich plant. So let's dive into that for a second. Nettle's affinity to work on the protein pathways of the body is one of its key health benefits. It helps the absorption of protein in the digestive system. It's full of protein itself. It also works with building blood protein, as well as working with allergic proteins, things that might cause us different kinds of allergic reactions. Plus, it helps with uric acid buildup and the removal of protein through the kidneys. So in this way, all of this affinity with protein is a big part of how we work with this. Not only that, it grows in all those nitrogenous rich protein soils. Like I said, by outhouses, by compost heaps, by manure piles, and on the shady side here of a river valley where there's a lot of nutrients. In this case, we're next to a big river where many fish have probably died on these soils and built up the proteins of these banks and the nettles, they're flourishing. As the nutritive tonic that nettles are, it really has the capacity to work with blood sugar irregularities, including diabetes. It has the ability to regulate insulin, and it's a vasodilator that increases the size of the blood vessels by having nitric oxide in it. So it'll work with lower blood pressure and just kind of help balance out any of those states where we're feeling low, and also bring us a bit more mental clarity. This is one that can help us sharpen our mind, get more in the flow, and just be more embodied. So whether we're stinging ourselves to get embodied, or whether we're drinking as a tea or taking it as a tincture, it's a great one to just neutrify any of those depressed tissues and any of that apathetic state, depression, whatever it might be, lack of focus, irregular blood sugars, any of that type of thing, nettles. So I mentioned how nettles are good for depressed tissues and anemia and all that kind of thing. Well, they're also good for redness and irritation and inflammation and that kind of heat type personality. Energetically, they're ruled by Mars from the astrological perspective. They come in the Aries season, and they have just these sharp stingers that make them really that kind of blood stagnation and also blood support kind of herb. So we tend to use this for people who have eczema and psoriasis as well, whether it's a tea, any of that hot, irritated inflammation of the tissues, nettles can be a great one for teas, tinctures, and so much more. One of the more interesting things about nettles is how they work with testosterone. Now, as a man, I've researched this a bit. They're great for things like prostate cancer and benign enlarged prostate, but also for disrupting aromatase, which is a testosterone inhibitor that converts it into estrogen. Nettles can be useful in this case. They also can be useful for stimulating the hair growth, like I mentioned, which has a lot to do with the testosterone binding hormones. So for our sex hormones and invigorating the testosterone in a lower testosterone class of people, like myself sometimes, this is a great plant to start to look into working with. Often, it's the root that's used in these cases, but the tea has shown to have a lot of benefits as well. Now, we've talked a little bit about the sting, but there's something else that's really interesting about this plant is it actually creates a bit of a high. This high is something that has been studied a little bit. This herb used to be considered part of the cannabis family. It's now considered a different family, but it still binds into cannabis receptor sites in the body and works with the endocannabinol system. So even as I talk here, I'm starting to feel the effects of the nettles. I'm feeling alive. I'm feeling hydrated, connected, and ready to just dive into spring and hang out with the nettles. All right. This is one of my favorite plants, as you can see. It's just such an abundant, vibrant plant that has so much to offer us. So I hope you get out and connect with nettles. It's one that you've tuned into. I would love to hear from you in the comments. I'm out of breath, all these nettles. I'd love to know how you like to work with this plant. What are some of the benefits that you've seen? Share with the community and help us grow together our plant path, looking at this as one of our super nutritive spring tonics to start us off on a new spring season. All right. That's heavy nettles. See you later. Thank you, nettles. I'm appreciating you today. I appreciate how you show up to feed my whole family. Thank you, nettles. Thank you so. You know I love you. You love me, I hope too.