It is the first day of spring up here in the northern hemisphere, and coincidentally also the first day I got to go nettle foraging this year.
I've been going to this spot for a few years now, and each year I remove some of the invasive species growing there, along with any litter that I see. It's getting better and better, with fewer and fewer Holly trees, herb Roberts, English ivy vines, and so on.
This time I made a soup with the nettles, and added some lima beans I got on a trip. It feels very nice and celebratory, and tastes very good.
Plant nerdery ahead! So I've been foraging stinging nettles for a good while now, and until the past few years, I hadn't really thought much about of they were native or not. First, I was told they were non-native, then somebody told me there was a native subspecies, and then I finally looked it up for myself.
It turns out that we used to think they were sub species, but they're actually different species and can't hybridize. Also! The native one (to the coastal PNW, anyway) , U. gracilis, only has stinging hairs on the bottom of its leaves, while the one from Europe, U. diocia, has stinging hairs on top & bottom! Which is only useful for i.d. purposes if you're willing to get stung! (Which, for the record, I was)
Today I happened to get to visit two different nettle patches, and now that I am looking for it, it seems easy to tell that there's two different species here- but that's the tricky thing- a lot of i.d. factors usually used are plastic in nettles. They vary based on the conditions that the plants are growing in! Later in the year the differences will be more obvious, because gracilis is monoecious (both male and female flowers on the same plant), while diocia is dioecious (plants have either male or female flowers, not both), and diocia branches with flowering while gracilis does not.
References: https://www.wnps.org/native-plant-directory/431:urtica-dioica (which still lists them as subspecies)