Young nettles ready for cutting
🌿 How to Make Nettle Feed
Nettle feed is an excellent homemade liquid fertiliser, particularly useful for leafy growth. Nettles are naturally rich in nitrogen and silica, making them a useful feed for many plants during the growing season.
✂️ Collecting the Nettles
Cut young nettles down to around 5cm above ground level. Wear gloves, of course—you don’t want your homemade fertiliser to come with a free sting!
The leaves need to be crushed before making the feed. You can do this by:
- Scrunching the stems and leaves in gloved hands, or
- Spreading the nettles over a freshly mown lawn and running the lawnmower over them to chop them up.
Don’t worry if a little grass gets mixed in.
🪣 Making the Nettle Feed
- Put the crushed nettles into a bucket.
- Use approximately half a standard bucket of nettles (around 1kg) to 10 litres of water.
- Weigh the nettles down with a brick or similar heavy object.
- Cover with water.
- Ideally, use a bucket with a lid, as the mixture develops a rather strong smell as it ferments!
- Leave it to soak for 2–4 weeks, stirring occasionally.
The longer it ferments, the stronger the resulting liquid will be.
💧 Diluting Before Use
Once the nettles have broken down, strain off the liquid and dilute it with water before feeding your plants.
A simple guide is to dilute it until it resembles the colour of weak tea. It is better to start with a weaker solution and increase the strength if necessary.
Apply the diluted feed around the base of your plants rather than directly onto the foliage.
🔄 Keeping a Supply Going
There are two easy ways to maintain a supply of nettle feed throughout the summer.
Option 1 – Keep topping it up
As you use the liquid, replace it with fresh water and add more nettles every couple of months.
Option 2 – Start a fresh batch
Once the liquid has been used, empty the remaining nettle sludge onto the compost heap. It can help add moisture and acts as a useful compost activator.
Then simply start a new batch using fresh nettle growth.
🌱 Top tip: Nettles grow back quickly, so regular harvesting can provide you with a continuous supply of material for homemade plant feed throughout the growing season.