One excellent way to discover you have holes in your gardening gloves, I find, is to spend an afternoon pulling up all the nettles with the intent of making nettle tea for my tomatoes. Supposedly it’s best made with comfrey, but you have to actually grow comfrey whereas I find that nettles just grow themselves – all I had to do was wait a bit until they were big enough, put on a stout pair of gloves, and learn the hard way that it’s a complete myth that if you grasp a nettle firmly enough it won’t sting. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve no idea why it should be nettles that you use and not any other weed, unless this particular idea is the result of a bet between gardening writers as to who could make their readers do the most painful and ridiculous thing and get away with it. No doubt decking came a close second…
But that’s all by the by and the nettles are in a bucket now (I meant to make it ages ago, but had to wait until I got around to replacing last year’s bucket. Plastic may last forever but it turns out plastic buckets don’t, or at least not in the form that holds water. Bah. And then I find this thread recommending using milk containers instead. Doh. Next year), topped up with water and weighed down with a large stone, waiting to miraculously be transformed into plant food. I did this last year, and I even took some photographs meaning to blog about it but I never quite got round to it. Partly because the resulting photographs were pretty uninformative, if a bit revolting, but mainly because photos themselves cannot do anything like justice to the resulting smell. Put it this way, if you read the word ‘tea’ and started thinking of some sort of wholesome brew, think again – nettle effluent would come closer. Put it another way – if you had murdered someone and buried them under the rose bushes, a batch of nettle tea brewing alongside would quickly mask any of the resulting odours (and provide an excuse if the plants put on a growth spurt to boot). Fortunately for you lot the STP (Smell Transfer Protocol) standard has yet to be perfected so I can’t bring it to you in smellovision, but I may have to have a crack at putting it into words as it gets into its stride. You have been warned
I keep meaning to read up more on plant nutrition and become a proper gardener, the kind who can remember the difference between nitrogen, potassium and the other one and keep track of what supplies what and why and when, but every time I start to look into it properly my brain starts to hurt and gardening starts to feel like work – the sort of thing you can get wrong. And that’s no fun, so I go back to randomly googling stuff on the internet and doing the things that sound as if they make sense, or at least might make a vaguely amusing blog post. And all I can say is the nettle tea seems to work, at least for me. Although I’m very glad that, as a tomato-sceptic, I don’t actually have to eat the end result. Me, I’m sticking to the veg I feed on coffee.
Posted by disgruntled 
