Nettle fibre shenanigans

[Cyclingrelf]

I've been trying to extract lovely soft nettle fibres for weaving. I have seen pictures of what they should [correction, Toddy says the below is just "smash". Frankly, I'd be pleased just to get this at the moment!] look like:

But I am struggling with the process. I understood it might be possible to treat stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) in much the same way as flax.

I found videos of the process with flax on youtube. Possibly the campest man I've seen, but he seems to have a good sense of humour about it (judging by the comments under his videos!)
Harvesting, drying and retting, drying again, breaking, scutching, hackling/combing, carding and spinning flax
http://www.youtube.com/user/attheHermitage/videos?view=0&flow=grid

So, armed with this information, odd titbits I picked up from around the internet, and a few pointers from Toddy I found on various threads here on bcuk, I went out and picked a bunch of nettles a couple of weeks ago at the start of May.

I read somewhere that nettles tend to rot too quickly due to the high sugar content of the leaves, so rather than retting them in a pond where the water is stagnant, I put them in a stream so that the water washed the sugars away. My nephews were very interested in the whole process, so they wanted to go back and look the next day. We found the leaves were being eaten off by little (1cm long) amphipods otherwise known as water shrimpy things.



They were also eating the outer coating of green, but I wasn't sure if they were leaving the fibres just inside the green coat or not. So I left them to it and took the nettles out a week later.


I don't really know how to tell when the nettles are rotted enough, but not too much, so I took them out anyway.

I dried the nettles by spreading them out on some newspaper in our porch, then had a go at breaking them. I don't have a flax break, so I invented a method whereby I put the nettles in a cloth bag and shut them in a door a few times. This didn't have much effect, other than snapping a few, so I tried driving my car over the bag a few times. Hmmm...therapeutic. Then I hit it with a rolling pin. Then I tipped the contents of the bag out onto a chopping board and photographed it for you.

So, I had a heap of little matchsticks and not much sign of fibre, other than a few of the cotton threads from the bag I put them in. Did I:

a) pick the nettles too early in the season. Try again later and I might have more success
b) let the water shrimps eat too much and the fibres had all gone by the time I dried the nettles and bashed them
c) use totally the wrong process and there is a much easier way than this

???????

I got hold of "From Sting to Spin" by Gillian Edom, on the recommendation of Eric. I have read it all, but there is very little detailed practical information about extracting the fibres.

• What should retted nettles look/feel like?
• Do you remove the leaves before retting or after?
• Do you have to dry the nettles before as well as after retting?
• How do you get the fibres out? Toddy mentions combing the fibres free after retting whilst the nettles are still wet http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6429&p=89275#post89275 - or is that purely for the fibre/green stuff mixture you use for cordage rather than the fine fibres for spinning? Elsewhere it says to do the same as for flax - i.e. break and comb the fibres out?

Hoping some of you textiles experts (Toddy? ) might be able to help me with this. Thanks for reading!!

 

[Toddy]

Too early I reckon; you really want late on in the season for fibres.
Cut them,
Stook them,
Rett them,
Stook them,
Break them,
Comb them = fine white fibres, and not smash like the stuff in that first photo.

Basically you want the phloem cells and they're firmer and stronger later on. Since you're effectively breaking them out of the skin you have to either use a decorticorer or to rot them out. It's an anaerobic process and they'll stink when you do it.

If you peel the skins you can gently poach them in washing soda and then dry them out and try scutching and combing. Often works quite well, but there's a lot of smash sometimes.

Interested to see how you get on with it You're usually quite determined to do a very good job, and that's usually very, very effective

atb,
Mary

 

[CBJ]

Great thread,

I agree with Toddy I think you have picked them a bit too early. When I was looking into making a net from nettle fibers they recommended that you harvest the nettles late on in the season. I came across a few interesting write ups one of the paragraphs that I found interesting was:

"The ‘bark’ stem of the nettle plant contains pliable fibers that can be woven, spun or twisted to make cloth or cordage. Although we are reinventing the art of making cloth from nettles there are still places where it is done. For example a cloth called ‘ramie’ is made from the fibres of an Asian nettle (Boehmeria nivea). Nettle is still collected and processed in the Himalayas. The ‘bark’ is stripped from the plant and dried for 3 days in the sun. Then it is put in a pond for 10 days and then rinsed in running water, then spun into a rough yarn. The same process doesn’t seem to work for European nettles though as they just break down in the water."


I look forward to seeing how you get on with it.


Atb

Craig

 

[palmnut]

I've tried all ways - leave them to die and then try; cut them late and rett fresh (in a washing bowl); let them dry and try to break out fibres. All no joy.

I have read that you should leave the cut stems in long damp grass for a day or two as retting in your actual water is too powerful for British nettles - may be worth a try later this year (assuming we have damp grass at the right time - dead cert, then :-( ).

Peter

 

[John Fenna]

I was told - before flowering for food and drink, after flowering for fibres ...

 

[Cyclingrelf]

Thanks everyone! In that case, I shall have another go...I already picked another bunch, so will see how that works. But otherwise will wait until after they flower - thanks John for that suggestion. Toddy, thank you for looking in and sharing your experience. I knew you'd be a mine of information.
Palmnut, if I manage to crack this, then I'll post on this thread with the how-to

 

[John Fenna]

Mind you - I find that by the time the nettles are coming up I have almost run out of Nettle wine so the entire patch gets used for that anyway and the demijohns are all full until after they have all died back for the winter again....

 

[Cyclingrelf]

Round 2 of trying to produce nettle fibres.

I picked 3 bundles of nettles. One lot I put in the stream, as before. One lot I spread out in some damp grass. One lot I peeled the skins off and poached the skins in soda crystals. I tried to remember to turn the ones on the grass every so often. As before, the ones in the stream were soon covered in tiny amphipods.

After a couple of weeks, I brought in the ones from the stream and the grass to dry. The ones in the grass had gone a bit mouldy.

The ones I took the skins off and poached with soda crystals, I wasn't sure how long to do it for, nor how strong to make the solution. So I erred on the side of caution and poached them for about 10 minutes in a solution of about 3 tablespoons in a baking pan of water. I rinsed them to get the soda off again and hung them up to dry.

The drying nettles were all indoors, since Cornwall is far too damp at the moment to dry anything outside.

Once dry, I examined individual stalks to get a feel for the chances of success. The nettles that had been in the stream snapped cleanly and easily with no signs of any fibres at all. I think the amphipods ate them all. The nettles that had been in the wet grass bent and showed obvious signs of having fibres still in the stems. However, the fibres didn't appear to be separating very easily when I snapped a stem and tried to pull them out of the skin. Similarly, the dried nettle skins obviously had plenty of fibre in them, but it was very difficult to get any out.

I had a go at combing the nettle skins with my improvised heckling comb (two metal dog combs held in a vice) but, as suspected, the fibres didn't want to separate from the rest of the material. I can see them in the broken ends, though, so that is encouraging!

My heckling comb - it's been through a bit of rough treatment today!



The skins that had been poached in soda crystals then dried and combed. Encouraging to see the fibres poking out of the ends


The nettles that had been left in long damp grass. Bit mouldy, and not as encouraging as the skins, but still showing some fibres.


Since peeling the skins and poaching them has produced the most encouraging results, I'm going to have another go at that method and poach them for a bit longer in the soda crystals this time.
Incidentally, I've found another very useful thread on this topic: http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=92669

 

[Mouse040]

Love reading posts like this a lot to be learned

 

[Cyclingrelf]

By way of update, I tried poaching the nettle skins in soda crystal water again. According to this website: http://www.twocrows.co.uk/kaleidescopes/text-pages/broom-text.html, broom branches are poached in lye solution for 3 hours to remove the fibres. For interest, here is the full quote

A fibre is obtained from the bark, it is used in the manufacture of paper, cloth and nets. It is not as strong as the fibre from the Spanish broom (Spartium junceum). The fibre is also obtained from the root. The bark fibre is used to make paper, it is 2 - 9mm long. The branches are harvested in late summer or autumn, the leaves removed and the stems steamed until the fibres can be stripped. The fibres are cooked for 3 hours in lye then put in a ball mill for 3 hours. The paper is pale tan in colour. The bark is a good source of tannin. Modern dyers report that the flowering tops of broom produce various shades of yellow, according to the mordants used; [Alum & Cream of Tartar = 'butter yellow']; [Tin = 'yellow']; [Chrome = 'golden']. A yellow and a brown dye are obtained from the bark. A yellow dye is obtained from the flowering stem. A green dye is obtained from the leaves and young tops. The branches are used to make baskets, brushes, brooms and besoms. They are also sometimes used for thatching roofs and as substitutes for reeds in making fences or screens. An essential oil from the flowers is used in perfumery. Growing well on dry banks and on steep slopes, it is an effective sand binder and soil stabiliser. Broom is one of the first plants to colonize coastal sand dunes. Like other leguminous plants it is a fixer of nitrogen. The plant attracts insects away from nearby plants. The wood is very hard, and beautifully veined. The plant seldom reaches sufficient size for its wood to be of much value, but larger specimens are valued by cabinet makers and for veneer.

I poached the nettle skins for 2 hours. While they were still wet, it seemed that the green mush was separating from the fibres more easily than before, so I dried the skins and combed them, in the same way as before. I have produced my first nettle smash!

There isn't very much of it - just a wisp I can hold between finger and thumb, but it's encouraging.

I did some more internet research and found this experiment by the Nuffield Foundation to extract fibres from nettles for experimentation.
http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/practical-biology/extracting-fibres-plants They have this to say about retting nettles:

Retting plants reek. Consider ventilation when setting this up. When soaking the nettles, it is best to remove all the leaves and flowers – they form a slimy mass as they rot and make the smell of the rotting nettles even worse! Once the nettles have been soaked for about a week (this depends on temperature, in cooler weather it may take longer) all the soft tissue, both outside and inside the vascular bundles will wash away in water. The ring of vascular bundles may need to be opened to wash out the pith within.

So it would seem that I still haven't retted my nettles for long enough. I am trying again, but this time with the traditional method mentioned by Toddy.
Here is my latest stook of nettles

Mother was delighted, as I took them all out of her garden You can also just make out the frankenstein marks on my ankles where I had an accident with a sliding glass door last year - oops!

So, a week of drying out, another week or so of retting (bearing in mind Nuffield's comment that they're not done until the green mush washes away) and another week of drying to go...

Meantime, folks might like this video by John-Paul Flintoff http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QSvdAZeOxw all about nettles. Possibly slightly over-optimistic, but nevertheless interesting and I've just read his book and can heartily recommend it!

 

[John Fenna]

Great thread!
I look forward to the next instalment

 

[Elen Sentier]

Too early I reckon; you really want late on in the season for fibres.
Cut them,
Stook them,
Rett them,
Stook them,
Break them,
Comb them = fine white fibres, and not smash like the stuff in that first photo.

Basically you want the phloem cells and they're firmer and stronger later on. Since you're effectively breaking them out of the skin you have to either use a decorticorer or to rot them out. It's an anaerobic process and they'll stink when you do it.

If you peel the skins you can gently poach them in washing soda and then dry them out and try scutching and combing. Often works quite well, but there's a lot of smash sometimes.

Interested to see how you get on with it You're usually quite determined to do a very good job, and that's usually very, very effective

atb,
Mary

Will the current heatwave have helped with this ... we have a lot of nettles here!

 

[Toddy]

Cyclingrelf, I'm impressed and thank you for the research and links Good stuff, all good stuff

This weather has really brought the nettle on, and that it's dry means that the phloem cells are really working overtime trying to carry water up to the flower heads; it should be a bumper year for fibres

It's always been a judgement call, dealing with nettles. Too damp a year and they'll go mouldy as they dew rett , and they don't dry out well when stooked either. It was an after the harvest was in kind of activity in the past, and it didn't need done when everyone was already busy.

Nettle fibres are beautiful, but there's never an awful lot of them in a stem anyway. For flax about 11 to 12% of the dry stem is fibre, with nettles is 1 or 2 %. Not a lot, but what there is is brilliant stuff. It had another huge advantage for an agricultural economy too, it didn't need to be actively cropped; it didn't need good arable land, it didn't need fertiliser.
It thrives at the back end of a barn where the nitrogen rich seepage from urine and dung leaches into the soil. It grows well along side stone dykes where the plough cannot safely be used, and it will grow in big clumps wherever it can root down.
A good product from otherwise hard to use small pockets of land.

cheers,
Mary

 

[Cyclingrelf]

Will the current heatwave have helped with this ... we have a lot of nettles here!

I'm guessing it will help with the drying process, but otherwise it's just the stage the nettles are at in their growth that makes a difference. It would appear that the best time to pick nettles is after they've flowered but before they start branching.
There's an interesting scientific paper about commercial nettle fibre extraction here http://orgprints.org/6926/1/AJAA18_3_2003_nettle.pdf from which I quote

Timing of harvest
Fiber production of nettle begins with the second crop and continues successively. In the first year, nettle stalks do not achieve the quality required for fiber processing, i.e., the stalks are too thin, too ramified (branched) and have too many leaves (Bredemann, 1959). In the second year, fiber nettle can be harvested between mid July and early August (Vetter et al., 1996), or from early until late August (Bredemann, 1959). Plants are ready for harvest when seed matures in the lower parts of the flowers of female clones (Bredemann, 1959). However, in a trial with different harvest dates, Vetter et al. (1996) showed that fiber nettle still blossoms at the plant apex when the highest stalk yield is reached. Vetter suggests harvesting when the stalks are equivalent to of 80% of the above-ground biomass. Thus, the harvest should begin before development of secondary lateral shoots from the nettle leaf axils. Lateral shoots do not cause a loss in fiber quality but interfere with processing because the stalks dry too slowly in the fields (Bredemann, 1959).

 

[Cyclingrelf]

Oops - sorry Toddy, cross posted and I stand corrected
Thanks so much for your input and interest - it's great encouragement.

 

[Toddy]

Nice article that one too

I think perhaps it's the difference between what people 'could' do, time wise, land wise, resource wise, that gave them a good result for efficient effort, against the commercial results from mechanised planting, harvest and processing.

Basically, both have validity, but I don't have a decorticorer and personally, I gather nettles from now onwards simply because they're so tall they're a pest in the garden now. I don't take them all, but I slowly build up the drying stash
The wild ones along the paths I'll take if my neighbours are going to strim them down to mush, but otherwise I'd leave them until they were really well grown and I had the time and notion to take them.

On past experience I think your last stook should do very well indeed. They've had time to grow and firm up and should be fibre rich

Lovely thread thank you for keeping it interesting

atb,
Mary

 

[Skaukraft]

Ah.
Liking this thread a lot!
I haven't given up my hope to make nettle bow string, and will have another go this autumn (I hope).
Will most certainly follow this thread.
Thanks for the inspiration!

 

[Skaukraft]

Stumblede across this site googling around: http://nettlecraft.com/Root_Retting_Recipie.php

 

[Cyclingrelf]

Thanks for posting that - good link. I'm not sure if it would work here in Cornwall, as we have a very damp and warm climate (not much frost!!), so I think our nettles rot over winter rather than retting.

I'll keep an eye out and see if I can get any root-retted nettles to play with next year

Meanwhile, I haven't had time to do anything about my stook yet - so it's still out enjoying the weather. Hoping it hasn't gone mouldy while I wasn't looking.

 

[Toddy]

Good link Skaukraft, thank you ....interesting too because I met an elderly Estonian lady who said that they left nettles to overwinter and the frost killed off the leaves, etc., leaving the stems to dry off and the bark to come free easily when beaten.
Their Winters are continental ones though, and are cold and dry whereas ours are damp and warmer, and sort of cycle through wet and mild periods, and things rot rather than wither. We really do have a very temperate climate without the long hard cold that the continents endure. It does get cold, but it's a wet cold.

I quite fancy having a go with the broom for fibres and seeing how well we can break them out too.

cheers,
Mary