In late winter this year I discovered by happenstance that the larger stems I had left standing in my nettle bed had achieved an excellent level of breakdown (“retting”) to free the bast fibers from the green gunk and woody tissue they are surrounded with when fresh. I discovered this when attempting to clear the old stems from the bed by snapping them off — I instead got a snapped stem that wouldn’t easily come apart from the base because the fibers around the outside were still intact.
Now, last year I had an absolute bumper crop of Red Admiral butterfly caterpillars. Which is to say, my nettle patch had a bit of a tough time for a bit, and many of the stalks lost their tops and all of their leaves until they grew new ones. So these stalks were not the tallest or straightest specimens. But as they were apparently perfectly retted with zero effort from me, I happily cut them down and took the 4-5 foot stalks to my covered deck to dry out.
Which turned out to be a good thing, as it was quite a wet spring! Between that and many fewer caterpillars, this year’s nettle patch is currently about 7 feet tall and looking great. Here’s how they are doing now (with goldenrod and white snakeroot growing around them).
Once the stems were dry, I put down an old bedsheet over my usual seat inside so I could peel them where it was warm without getting debris all over the furniture. I used a knife to split the stems, flattened them, and then snapped out the woody cores a little at a time.
Where the stems have nodes, it sometimes helps to snap and peel from above and below the node so you are more likely to keep the fiber intact. I found the fibers I was dealing with seemed to be quite fine and strong, and the bast peeled off beautifully.
However, it did still have quite a bit of the outer skin still stuck to it. I collected it into hanks and coiled them up to store as I processed the stems over the course of several days with breaks in between. And with the exception of one hank I took out to test in my run room, they sat in a paper bag until the weather improved and I could do the next steps outside.
In June we had a heat wave, and on the third day I thought to myself, “Self, surely this is the perfect time to run outside and spend half an hour vigorously rolling nettle fiber between your hands to remove the dusty, flaky skin bits and start separating the fibers from each other!” So I put the five remaining hanks together into one mega-hank and did that. And sweated. A lot. Hat tip to our new heat pump for being the MVP of me not regretting impulsive decisions.
After thirty minutes of being rolled between my hands, this is what the fiber looks like. And now you’re caught up to where I am on this project. The fiber needs more work before it’s ready to use for anything — I will probably loosen it up, shake it out, and give it another round before I start trying to comb it out. It will be interesting to see what is left!
Smash the Shell 