Whipped With Nettles
Although I still haven’t managed to get my hands on any nettles — much to Bethie’s relief — I continue to think that the combination of quite fearsome pain (to judge by various accounts I’ve read) and utter harmlessness make stinging nettles a promising sort of spanking toy. Here’s a comic book panel that features a nettle whipping:
Via Urtication.com.
See Also:
I’m pretty sure you can grow your own nettles, in a pot on the windowsill. Sorry, Bethie :)
Adele, they are basically a weed, so I’m sure you’re right. So sure, in fact, that I’ve made a couple of attempts at home cultivation. Unfortunately, the seeds do not germinate easily; they require one of those special “soak and chill and then warm up” cycles that my mother found as intuitive as breathing, but which I have so far failed at managing. Instead of sproutlings I get seed mold. :(
Internet sources suggest it’s much easier to start with cuttings, which should not be hard; as I said, they are basically a weed in the climate zone where I live. However, they seem to be a fairly *rare* weed in my town, because despite my careful attention when strolling out, I’ve not been able to find any yet.
I only know one “plant lady” locally who would know where they grow. Unfortunately, I don’t have a plausible tale to explain my interest. She’s a relative, so she knows me too well to believe I’ve developed a sudden interest in making nettle soup!
Don’t worry, spring is coming, I have seeds and potting soil and a much better set of germination instructions from the internets than I had last time. This isn’t over! ;-)
I have never heard of anybody tring to propagate nettles from seed. they are normaly farmed comercialy from split root cuttings (don’t know the law in USA but in Europe nettles used in commercial products like tea and cheese have to be farmed they cannot be gathered from the wild). Split root is easy, find a nettle in the ground (even one in its “dead” winter state) tear the root appart, making sure you have some surface potentials on each bit and shove them in a pot on the window sill. Make sure you mix some grit in with your compost, nettles like gritty stony soil and fertalise with cold tea (without milk).
Prefectdt
I was trying seed because that you can buy over the internet — split root, not so much.
Thanks for the cultivation tips!
Nettles are really easy to grow if you really want them. They spread easily though, so if you’ve got a pristine lawn and garden, you’ll want to find a spot you can control them. They are tall and shrubby plants and they even hurt to keep them trimmed back. They leave little spines in the skin even just brushing against them….so they would be a wicked punishment and would require some aftercare to clean the little needles out of the skin. They are like a weed and grow as prolifically. They like crappy soils as perfectdt said. Stick them anywhere you can control their spread and you’ll never run out of the things.
You can get nettle seeds from fedco.com.
Nettles can be nasty and like many plant related things, how nasty depends on many things – how old, where they grew, what part of the plant is used, where applied, and the victims sensitivity/immune response. Having been on the receiving end I also know that once applied there is NO turning it off. On a canoe trip once I brushed my hand through some older stacks as we portaged. The back of my hand broke out in a series of red scratches surrounded by a puffy rash-like redness that itched like crazy. The scratches took several days to heal though of course canoe treking is tough on skin anyway with the constant exposure to water, sun, and wind.
Hmm, if you really needed an excuse to offer to the plant lady, you could claim you want to make nettle soup.
(It’s actually quite tasty, my granny used to make it.)
Sadly, that would be deeply out of character for me, which is why I wrote: “She’s a relative, so she knows me too well to believe I’ve developed a sudden interest in making nettle soup!”
I have a famous aversion to deep green vegetables – spinach or cooked greens of any kind. Even my lettuce, I like to be Iceberg (white and crispy and clean-flavored, not green and floppy and disgusting and tasting of weeds and dirt.) I avoid minestrone soup because it often has nasty brown strings of boiled spinach in it, and as for that “Italian wedding soup” stuff that’s half spinach, I’d call it “Italian Divorce Soup”. Whatever the reality of what nettle soup may be like, the idea that I’d be a priori curious about soup made from roadside weeds would just not pass muster with anybody who knows me.
No, I’d need a stranger plant lady to tell me where the nettles are hiding. Either that, or I just need to get off my ass and go for more walks this spring, and find the nettles for myself.
Dan, is not not an option to drive through some woodland edge/countryside to pick some? It’s hard to believe. I live practically in the world that is FULL of nettles. By the way, they are fine spinach substitute for spinakopita. Anyhow, as far as the sensation goes, do you understand how nettles work and what makes them hurt? The stems (I believe), not leaves, are covered with many many extremely fine needles – so fine they are fuzzy, but they really do penetrate the skin, like glass or something, very fine and sharp fibers. So what they do is penetrate the skin and “inject” a chemical inside your skin, which causes a combination of burning and itching – but mostly itching. It’s along the lines of poison ivy effect. I have managed to make it go away entirely by washing the affected area with soap and warm water (tell that to Bethie). They irritate the skin, that’s what they do. And no, because I am well familiar with its effect, it doesn’t belong in my sextoy box.
Amber, I don’t want to be too specific about my geographic location, but it’s a place where nettles are present (according to the plant books, and I’ve seen them once, many years ago, in a garden where they were being nurtured by a woman who used them to relieve the symptoms of her arthritis) but not particularly common. Other roadside vegetation is profuse, and my plant identification skills are, apparently, minimal.
I am indeed familiar with the mechanics of action of stinging nettles — I’ve handled them while traveling in places they are more common. And there are some very detailed web resources linked at urtication.com.
Is this a spanking blog or a gardening blog?
Actually, the mention of nettles as an instrument of pain caught my attention because one of my perennial S&M fantasies is to make a woman strip to her panties, then force her to walk through a dense wooded area that’s thick with the nasty things. And plenty of thorny brambles, just for good measure. It would be both painful and deliciously degrading.
I love to be made to strip and ordered to walk into patches of nettles to lie down and roll in them