From a young age we quickly learn to steer clear of stinging nettles, but you shouldn't be put off by their harmful foliage – stinging nettles actually bring lots of benefits to the garden.
Whether you use them to make nettle leaf tea or nettle tea fertilizer for your tomatoes, stinging nettles (botanically known as Urtica dioica) are packed with nutrients for plants and people, and even support garden wildlife in a few different ways.
Here, we talk through three reasons why you should leave stinging nettles in your garden. You can even purchase stinging nettle seeds from Amazon if you haven't already got them growing.
1. Make Nettle Tea
The first reason to leave stinging nettles in your garden is because you can actually harvest it to make your own herbal tea.
Nettle leaf tea is made by steeping dried nettle leaves in water for 10-20 minutes. It has an earthy flavor and anti-inflammatory properties as a medicinal plant. It's even thought to support skin health.
You can actually purchase nettle leaf teabags from Walmart and dried nettle leaves from Amazon to make your own.
If you are harvesting stinging nettle leaves from your garden, look for the young, tender leaves that haven't been treated with pesticides. You should wear gloves to protect your skin (like these thorn-proof gardening gloves from Amazon), and pick the leaves with your fingers. Or, you can use these Fiskars micro snips from Amazon.
2. Make an Organic Fertilizer
It's true that you can make plant fertilizer using weeds, as many are packed with essential plant nutrients. When it comes to stinging nettles, they're a great source of nitrogen.
What nitrogen does for plants is encourage vegetative, foliage growth. You find it as the first plant fertilizer number on the NPK label on fertilizer products.
Nettle tea fertilizer is made the same as nettle tea, by steeping the leaves. Though, it should be left to steep for 2-4 weeks before using in the garden for effective results.
It creates an organic plant fertilizer to give your crops a boost ahead of flower production, ideal for fertilizing tomatoes, for example.
3. Leave Them for Wildlife
While it can be easy to think stinging nettles are weeds to get rid of, they're actually invaluable to wildlife.
In particular, they're a vital food source for butterfly and moth caterpillars. They also provide shelter for a wide range of beneficial insects, including lacewings and hoverflies.
The likes of aphids are also attracted to stinging nettles, which in turn encourages their predators like ladybugs, aiding natural pest control in your yard.
They also help feed garden birds who forage for the insects found on stinging nettles.
Leaving a wild patch of stinging nettles can therefore help boost the biodiversity in your yard.
What to Shop
Use these tea strainers to steep dried nettle leaves to make nettle leaf tea and other homegrown herbal tea.
These long-sleeve gardening gloves are thorn-proof and will protect your hands and arms when tending to the garden.
These Felco F2 pruning shears are made for lifetime use, with replaceable parts. It has a bypass blade and aluminium handles.
While stinging nettles are weeds to consider leaving in your yard, there are also many invasive weeds to watch out for. If you do need to get rid of any weeds, there are several methods you can try. One of the most effective is using a weed pulling tool (like this from Amazon) to pull up the roots and stop it growing back.
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