Nettles Tea & Broccoli bigger Than Your Head

Don't eat anything bigger than your head.

Nettle Tea
This Spring I harvested loads of nettles for teas for myself and my garden. I harvested the first tips without gloves, and enjoyed the baby stings so much, that I whipped my arthritic wrists for the pleasure and pain of too much stimulation.
There are alleged health benefits to the stingle (sting/tingle) of nettles - increased circulation to the stimulated areas - the body's own healing forces  drawn to where they are needed most.
In any case I like to drink an invigorating cup of nettle tea in the morning, and I don't mind a little stingle along with the harvest - makes me feel more in touch with the nettles plant.
Later in spring I come back for more nettles for my garden. The nettles are waste high and threatening to flower any day now. Last year I borrowed the perfect tool, a weed whacker that swings like a golf club with a blade on the end of it. I mowed the nettles down, and forked them into my truck with a pitch fork - a relatively stingle-free adventure.
This year I have a Japanese hand sickle called a kama. To use it I have to get up close and personal with the nettles. The nettles are more venomous, with more sting and less tingle. They sting me through my long sleeve shirt and pants, and through the backs of my gloves. I harvest enough to fill a trash can. I'm harvesting for a large garden - a five gallon bucket would be adequate for most gardens.
I cover the nettles with water, and let it sit for a few days before I use it to fertilize my garden. I'm careful to dilute it ten to one with water before I put it on my plants. I've experimented with less dilute mixtures and burned some of my plants with excess nitrogen. I fertilized the greedier feeders in my garden once a week during their youth. Any plants that looked like they could use a boost, I fertilize now and then.
The nettles tea starts to stink after a month, sooner if the weather is warmer. It's still good as a fertilizer, and you can continue to use it until the stench outweighs the value of the fertilizer.  When blowfly larva start to appear, it's definitely time to toss it.
I grew cabbages with leaves as large as collards and broccoli-bigger-than-your-head, thanks to weekly doses of nettles tea.

Broccoli bigger than your head
This summer we grew so many over-sized broccoli that we had too much to harvest, and had to give some away. A record-setting, cool spring and early summer created ideal broccoli growing conditions. Weekly waterings with nettles tea insured vigorous growth in during childhood and early adolescence of our broccoli plants.

Second summer broccoli

Of course the variety we chose made a big difference - Belstar, an F1hybrid that we purchased from Johnnys Seeds.
I was showing off my super-sized broccoli when my next door neighbor showed me her Belstar broccoli plant that had overwintered from last year and produced a fine head of broccoli.
Wow perennial broccoli! I've had kale plants that lasted more then one year - the longest lasting one lived seven years before the wind chopped its head off. It was growing in my parking lot where it never got fertilized or watered.

Long-lived brassica plants are nothing new. The Walking Stick kale is an example of a brassica  that has been especially bred to grow for more than one year. They are cut, dried and shellacked to create picturesque walking canes, and cudgels to chase away children and other garden pests from the cherry orchard.   http://www.anniesannuals.com/plt_lst/lists/general/lst.gen.asp?prodid=2875

The trick to extending the life span of your kale and broccoli plants is to disrupt the flowering cycle of your plants. Ordinarily annuals and biennials (plants that complete their life cycle in one or two seasons) expend all their energy flowering and producing seeds. Their role in the ecosystem is to fill in the blank spots as quickly as possible to protect the soil from the elements. They live fast, die young, and leave lots of seeds so they can do it all over again.
When a plant flowers, energy from the roots and leaves is sent to the flowering parts of the plants. For long lived plants you can and should cut back the flowers, but it is usually not enough. You need to cut the energy off at the source by picking off the leaves. Good luck in your experiments with perennial broccoli and kale plants.