A Farmer Considers a Thorny Proposition

By Andy Griffin

Spring is the cruelest season. She arrives on a sunbeam, lithe and lovely, wrapped in little more than the scent of sweet peas, and holding a posy of buttercups for modesty’s sake. She rolls with a posse of fuzzy lambs and bouncing bunnies, but don’t let her pets beguile you—spring can be one mean, skinny bitch! In the animal kingdom, springtime means hibernation is over. For the bears, spring means their autumn rolls of fat have melted away until their ribs stand out. For the squirrels, spring means the hidden granaries are exhausted, and any acorns they haven’t yet eaten have sprouted or rotted. And for us, at least before we invented refrigeration and transportation, spring meant making the remaining overwintered roots in the cellar last until we could forage in muddy fields for the earliest fresh greens.

When spring came to my farm this year I still had some of last year’s carrots in my fields, and my newly sown crops had already sprouted, but I was hungry for something different. I’m modern—I can drive to the market—but for fun I took a walk in the forest below my house to see what would have been available for peasants to eat back in olden times.

By my gatepost I found a tuft of salad burnet growing. Salad burnet is edible, if you’re hungry enough. The leaves have a pleasant cucumber flavor, but they’re tiny, and the plant’s stems are wiry and tough. My flock of goats saw me preparing to go down into the canyon, and they crowded around me, bleating with excitement. I didn’t let them follow me. Gathering herbs with a bunch of goats would be difficult, because they’re so nimble and focused.

Besides, the goats might get eaten themselves. My does were kidding, and the smell of blood and afterbirth had attracted predators. I’d already lost one mature agouti Nubian doe to a mountain lion. The cougar killed her with a single blow to the head and ripped her throat out. The pregnant goat was too big for the cat to haul off, so I found her dead and bloated by the fence. Four days later a Fish and Game officer shot a mountain lion a mile from my place at the Pinto Lake Trailer Park as it ate a Chihuahua, so I’m hoping it was the same beast. Then three baby goats simply evaporated from the pasture, leaving their worried mothers to stare into the forest, calling for their kids while they straddled their painfully swollen udders. I blame bobcats for this loss, because they’re ferocious, beautifully camouflaged, and very discrete. For their protection, I brought my animals in as close to my house as I could, without actually letting them into the living room. (One of the kids has made it that far twice, but that’s another story!)

I closed the gate, leaving my bored and impatient goats behind and went down the trail into the woods. I found plenty of chickweed, Miner’s lettuce and cress. These herbs are tasty, especially when lightly dressed with vinaigrette, but they’re insubstantial fare. Then I came to sprawling beds of stinging nettles. I knew that I could collect these nettles and boil them like spinach….if I had to!

Precious nettles

I like nettles, and we harvest lots of nettles on my farm, but we sell a different kind of nettle than the ones that grow wild in my canyon. We sell Urtica urens, a culinary nettle native to Europe and Asia that’s also called dwarf nettle. It’s a low-growing herb with slender stems and delicate leaves, and when steamed it has a delightful, nutlike spinachy flavor. We don’t plant Urtica urens; we just take advantage of the nettles that sprout up in the rows. My workers put on rubber surgical gloves and snip the little stinging nettles with scissors.

Dwarf nettles arrived in California with the Italian and Chinese immigrants who once cultivated them purposefully, and they’ve persisted on in agricultural fields as weeds. Nettles are still popular with chefs who cook in a Mediterranean tradition. At Quince in Pacific Heights for example, Chef Mike Tusk has nettles on his menu almost every day of the year. They show up in soups and ravioli stuffing, in purées and in savory sformati. He fries nettles and sprinkles them on steaks, and makes sauces out of them to dress pasta dishes. He even folds nettles into dough to color the noodles green.

I’m not aware of any Chinese restaurants in San Francisco that serve nettles, but I’ve seen little green statues of the Tibetan yogi Milarepa on sale in Chinatown. I’m told that the figurines are carved of green stone to remind us that Milarepa lived for years in a cave in the Himalayas on a diet of nettle tea. Nettle tea is delicious, and cooked nettles are such a vivid green you’d swear they’ve been dyed with artificial chemicals.

Well stung

You don’t want to eat them raw, but nettles are a pure and healthy food if cooked. When I used to sell nettles at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, I always put them in a basket at the back of the stall with a sign that said, “Warning! Nettles sting!” I didn’t want any children or personal-injury lawyers to hurt themselves in my booth. But one day a middle-aged woman walked up to the nettle basket. She carefully read the sign, and then pushed a white hand deep into the display. “Oooh,” she squeaked, and hopped back a step.

“I wasn’t kidding when I wrote the sign,” I told her.

“They poked me!” she said. “But I’m OK. Actually, after reading your sign I’m surprised they don’t hurt more.”

“Nettles aren’t barbed,” I said. “Their stems and leaves are covered with tiny silica hairs that are hollow, like capillaries.”

“How do they sting?” she asked.

“The capillaries are filled with histamines and acids. When you touch a nettle, the capillaries shatter, and the toxins are dumped onto your skin to produce a mild chemical burn.”

“Do they ever hurt more than these do?”

“Nettles definitely sting the worst at harvest, because during the process of cutting, washing, and packing, most of the capillaries are broken. Culinary nettles are pretty mild, as nettles go, but I still put up a warning sign, because not everyone in the public is as tolerant of nettles as you are.”

“Do you have any bigger nettles that sting worse?” she asked.

“Wild nettles,” I said. “Urtica dioica. They hurt like hell. I’ve got a patch of them growing in the canyon at my home ranch. We call them ‘bull nettles’ because they’re really big. They’ll get 7 feet tall, or more.”

“Could you bring me some bull nettles next week?”

“You wouldn’t want to eat them,” I said. “They’re coarse and stringy, and their flavor is muddy. When you cook them up, they’re the color of dirty khaki.”

“I don’t want to eat them,” she said. “I want them for floggers! I’m part of the SM community, and I could help you sell them!”

I looked at the woman more closely. She came off like a librarian: mild-mannered, earnest. I considered her offer.

Small-scale farmers like me are always on the lookout for niche markets. My potential bull nettle customer had brought up a good point. I’d never heard of any other organic farm targeting the S&M community. (I’ve since learned they prefer “SM.”) Was it possible that our libraries were full of bull-nettle consumers who weren’t being satisfied at the farmers market? Was there a demographic that had remained untapped by Safeway or Whole Foods? Could I pioneer new dimensions in the produce aisle?

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “I can’t ask my employees to do anything I’m not willing to do, and I don’t want to pick bull nettles. They really do hurt, and I don’t want to get stung.”

She was disappointed.

“I tell you what,” I said. “If you want to come to the farm and ‘U-pick’ bull nettles, be my guest.”

But nothing came of my invitation. My librarian was too busy, or she didn’t have a car. When I told this story to my friend Susie Bright, she teased me for my naïveté. Susie is an editor, an erotic tastemaker, and the author of a number of books including Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World and The Sexual State of the Union.

“Do you want the sales?” she asked. “Remind your dominatrix customers that they don’t have to pick the nettles themselves. They can make their slave boys do the harvest!”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“I can hook you up with some people,” Susie offered. “Maybe get you a farmers market stall at the next Folsom Street Fair.”

I considered it. I could give my new business a snappy name like “Spank Me Organic!” I could go national and flog my wares over the Internet. Brisk sales of wild-crafted bull nettles could carry my farm through the lean root-crop months of March and April.

Meanwhile, I’ve planted lettuces, onions, basil, tomatoes, and peppers again. Summer’s harvests seem a long way off, but there the matter rests. I love spring, but I may be too much of a square peg to go into the whip business with her. Behind her buttercups, spring is complex and inscrutable.

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