Greetings beloved readers, welcome to my first newsletter! I am filled with joy for it to be received by you. I am here to share in a way that feels authentic and nourishing to my nervous system. Here I can freely share and be me without chasing likes or algorithms, which is just so not my vibe these days. That said, thank you for being here and allowing me this opportunity. I am immensely grateful for your time.

Well, it was a winter, ya’ll. Trust and believe. In my Northern part of the world we hadn’t had this much snow in over 30 years! High key, I loved it. In the beginning of Winter we were snowed in for weeks at a time and I revelled in it completely. It wasn’t however without hardship, we lost several chickens to the cold and my partners diligence in keeping the yard, paths and road cleared of the relentless snow broke his body down. As well, in our little tiny cabin with no real separation of space with 3 kids (2 of whom are technically homeschooled) and 2 adults, we were struggling to not breathe each others air at times. However, all the work we did the rest of the year made it so the weather could do whatever it wanted and we would be fine. The woodshed was full to keep us warm and the root cellar and freezers were full to keep us fed. We could be totally cut off from the outside world and on our little homestead we had what we needed to survive.

Over the years Winter has become my most cherished time. Spring, Summer and Fall have their own beauty and magic, but those seasons mean endless work on a homestead and within a sustenance offgrid lifestyle. Winter is the only time where rest is truly allowed. Sure there are wood chores to do, a fire to keep going, animals to care for and paths to keep clear of snow but everything unfolds at such a different pace. In this lifestyle I have learned to love winter fiercely, especially the darkest days and weeks around Solstice where I am able to dream inward and forward. A most precious time of seeing and seeding in the dark. In winters embrace I have actual time to write, read books, kitchen witch, crochet, and play music everyday. I could go on and on about how much I love and appreciate winter but I am reminded this newsletter is actually about Spring!

Spring in our northern boreal home comes on slowly and then all at once. It arrives with force and with it on our homestead we hit the ground running. On top of the baby animals, gardening and general homestead chores, it begins my wildcraft and medicine making season. I do love spring, as I love all seasons in turn even if Winter is not so secretly my favourite. For us, it is a grande event when the first baby stinging nettles are spotted, a true harbinger of spring and warmer, longer days. It’s usually the children who spot them first and I hear gleeful shrieking from across the yard “baby nettles!! baby nettles!!” and we all gather around and say hello to the wee babes and rejoice and offer gratitude that soon we will be eating them fresh everyday and will be drinking potent infusions filled with nettles green medicine.

Wee baby nettles popping up through the cold ground and ice

Do you nettle? I highly recommend. When they are young, we eat them not unlike you would use something like spinach or kale. Cooking or blending the young plants takes out the sting and makes it excellent food, drink and medicine for ingestion. Nettles in soup, sauce, in eggs, on pasta and rice, sautéed with garlic and so on. We basically just eat them on everything. The spring greens slough off the internal winter sludge from months of eating heavier foods and bring fresh life to our plates and potent nourishment to our bodies. Living seasonally, food is truly and most naturally how we celebrate and honour the turning wheel.

Fresh nettle infusions especially are a most magical experience. I love going out on a beautiful spring evening and harvesting fresh baby nettles then stuffing them into a mason jar, pouring over hot water, capping and letting them infuse overnight. In the morning I am gifted with the most beautiful emerald green elixir, my mouth just waters thinking about drinking the infusion down and feeling the life force it invokes in me.

Stinging nettle leaf, used as medicine in the spring, works to warm up and dry up the phlegmatic cold and wet state of the body after winter. Young nettle leaf is so nutrient dense and an infusion, which can be thought of as a more potent and much longer infused tea is truly a wild multivitamin. It is a source of iron, calcium, magnesium, chlorophyll, vitamins A,C,D,K, silica, zinc, potassium, chromium, boron, cobalt, niacin, phosphorus and manganese. Stinging nettle when fresh is also a potent anti-histamine and is a perfect remedy taken in fresh infusions for allergy season. Stinging Nettle is also a great remedy for those with anemia and for menstruating and lactating women because of its bioavailable iron. It also helps to support the kidneys, liver and uterus and is known as an alterative, a remedy that helps optimize the bodies processes of elimination and therefore helping to restore proper functioning and balance to the system. The seed and roots are also potent medicine but that is for another bit of writing.

Contraindications For Stinging Nettle: Some precautions to note with this wild herb and medicine. In pregnancy and breastfeeding there are few herbs we herbalists can recommend because there are little to no studies done on pregnant and breast feeding women. For myself, I was comfortable eating nettles and using nettle infusions while breastfeeding as they are so nutrient dense, iron rich and are a galactagogue which helps promote breast milk, but as always consult your health care provider before taking herbs if you are pregnant, breastfeeding, on medications or with various health conditions.

To Harvest.

Gather up a basket, a pair of scissors and a pair of gloves, or no gloves if you are hard core. My partner loves the sting and never protects his skin from nettles, he infact actively participates in urtication, the practice of flogging oneself with nettles to bring blood flow to joints and old injuries, its definitely some interesting old world medicine. I personally tend to wear gloves unless they are very small, there is a way to pinch the stem so it juices at the same time and doesn’t sting because nettle juice surprisingly is also an antidote to the sting! Nature is a magnificent and mysterious creature after all. Also, when I get stung which one does regardless of any precaution, its just kinda fair enough, ya know. So yes, back to the harvest. Venture into the yard or whatever wild space you know stinging nettle grows.* Nettles love disturbed ground. Make sure where you are isn’t compromised by animals or humans ( mainly dog pee or chemical sprays). So if you are gathering in a park space, know it’s not somewhere that’s sprayed or where dogs tend to overly roam. I chop off the young tops of the nettles, leaving the plant still alive and growing. Take only as much as you will use that day, or within a few days. Nettles, like any green leafy vegetable can be stored in the fridge for use.

Perfect looking dinner nettles, I just snip the top and chop them up!

Harvest the nettles for food when they are very young, up to 5 inches or so, this is when they are most palatable as far as texture goes. As they grow they are still great to use in infusions and to dry or tincture or vinegar for medicine up till they are about 10 inches or until they start going into flower. As soon as they start going into flower the leaves are no longer suitable for internal ingestion as they form cystoliths that can irritate the urinary system.  The leaves however can be used at any point externally for medicine, as in herbal hair and skin care, but again that would be a whole other bit of writing. Also worth mentioning is nettles can be used at any time to make a simple but potent all natural high nitrogen fertilizer, I’ve been doing it for years and its provides a great boost to many of my garden veggies and even house plants.

How to enjoy stinging nettle?

Let’s keep it pretty simple. I could offer elaborate recipes with a ton of ingredients that take time and effort, but that tends not to be me, that’s not how we live generally. For me it’s in the simple creation of food and medicine that is most sustainable and useful again and again over time. Really, in the spring, nettles will just get thrown into any food I’m making, be that sauce or soup or stir fry. I LOVE nettles in a borsch with a little splash of stinging nettle infused vinegar or nettles minced and added to an omelette. Here though is a nettle infusion recipe and some further ideas on how you can bring young stinging nettles into your kitchen and lives in the Spring!

Stinging Nettle Infusion

After your harvest, loosely stuff a quart mason jar about half to 3/4 full. If this is new to you go slow and harvest and use less. As you get used to the nettles you can add more to the jar. Bring water to a boil and pour into your nettle stuffed jar. I cap mine usually ( you don’t have to) and let sit overnight on the counter infusing. The longer steeping time draws out more of the minerals and makes your infusion much more potent. In the morning your gorgeous green elixir is ready. I like to drink half of it after I’ve had some water and then drink the other half somewhere else in the day, or you can drink it in 3 or 4 portions. It will also store in the fridge just fine for you to drink within 2-3 days. Remember that for some this can cause some mild cleansing of the system, so you may notice you will pee more or even have more frequent BM’s. This however should be mild. Stop and reduce the strength of your infusions if it any point it becomes too much. I drink nettle infusions most days of the week for several weeks in the spring and love what it does for my body. Not only is it mildly cleansing, it also offers energy! I find its better than a coffee and doesn’t have a crash afterwards.

Food Ideas – Really, I encourage you to just go for it, experiment and see where things land for you, start with a small amount and see how it fits into your cooking and increase the nettles in any given dish if its suits your tastes.

-a small handful added as the “greens” to your smoothies

-minced and sauteed with some garlic and onion to add to eggs or rice/grains or as the beginning of your pasta sauce and into your stirfry’s!

-chopped up and used to replace the spinach in your lasagna recipe, just add it to the layers like you would the spinach, simple as that. 

-chopped up and added to your homemade borsch instead of or in addition to the beet greens (this is my favourite! Nutrient dense city!!!) 

– chopped up and added to any soup or stew that calls for some greens, I love putting it in a pho or a coconut curry broth and even will put a small amount in a turkey noodle soup. Nettles shine in any tomato based soup aswell, minestrone being a great example.

– nettles can go great in your ferments also, added to sauerkraut and especially kimchi

-the possibilites are endless, just be open to the experience and let your taste buds and sense of nutrition guide you

Note that adding stinging nettle to food doesn’t generally have the same mild cleansing affect that an infusion will in the amounts you would tend to eat it in a serving.

A wildcrafted dinner basket featuring beloved young stinging nettle along with some dandelion blooms, fiddlehead ferns, fireweed shoots and young yarrow leaf.

*Always keep in mind

It is important, for me, as a wildcrafter and plant person to approach any harvest in a new place, or with a new plant as if I’m approaching a beloved and respected elder. I will introduce myself, ask that I be allowed a harvest and offer something in return, sometimes the offering will be Tobacco as is common practice in my cree culture, or sometimes its as simple as exuberant gratitude or a hair plucked from my very head. I am after all coming and very much asking for something important, and I wouldn’t want to ever present as rude or entitled. Truly I think of plants as our green elders, they have much to offer and teach us if we are respectful and open to listening. If I’m harvesting in a place I know or harvesting a plant I already have relationship with, my approach is much less formal but I’ll still greet the land and the plant as an old and cherished friend or family member with an expressive energy of love, respect and gratitude. Remember to only take what you need, use what you take and only consider harvesting up to a 1/3 of a healthy happy thriving population. Our goal as wildcrafters is to leave the land and plants in wellness and with enough left for the birds, bee’s, animals, other humans and for the next cycle of growth. Also and importantly…. be SURE of what you are harvesting, if you are new to this double and triple check you are picking the right plant, I have made mistakes you guys, many times, no one is infallible to this. There are so many great books and internet resources these days to help identify wild plants, use them and Happy Harvesting!

Dreaming Further, I have a few things going on this Growing Season:

-I will be doing my Wild Food and Medicine Plant walk at The North Country Fair again, so you can catch me there, I’ll be doing two walks on Saturday at 11am and 1pm. I usually have a few herbal goodies and medicines for sale in person that weekend. I plan to have different salves, herbal vinegars, bitters, wild inspired herbal salts and salad dressings, spruce tip jelly and more! The North Country Fair has my whole heart and is an essential part of who I am, my whole life is based around our Summer Solstice Celebration. Also my partner and I have a lil spooky band called Delicious Gloom and we will be performing a few songs throughout the weekend doing “tweener” sets between bands, so you can catch us on stage too! If you haven’t made it to the Fair, I highly recommend checking it out. https://northcountryfair.ca/

-I am again hosting an herbal medicine making workshop here at my home on the land in July. The workshop is titled “How to Harvest and Make Simple Wild Medicines for the Home Kitchen and Medicine Cabinet” and I’m so excited for that, I love gathering folks and helping to facilitate them harvesting and creating their own medicines. You can find out more information about that here https://craftofthewild.wordpress.com/herbal-medicine-making-workshop-july-25th-and-26th-2026/

– In early fall I will again put forth this newsletter which is a lot of fun for me in the absence of social media, it is much more aligned with what my nervous system has capacity for. Im not someone who has the time to video everything I do or chase algorithms, no ma’am. But perhaps one day I could share instructional videos here in my own time and pace. If you have something you would like me to teach via video or through a newsletter post, leave a comment and I will most definitely consider it.

-In the early fall I also hope to unveil what I have been working on this past winter which is a Boreal Wildcraft Calendar for 2027! It will contain gorgeous photos and wildcrafting recipes for each month of the year! Im hoping to have it ready to go for the fall but we will see what shakes loose.

Your Boreal Witch, 

Toniese