A perennial herbivorous nettle plant dioecious grows in almost every garden, but not everyone knows that it is one of those early foods that has a lot of multivitamins.
Nettles can be noticed immediately after the snow melts, and in early April it can already be eaten.
There are several varieties of nettle , but the nettle, dioecious, in Russia was often used: its tops fed to chickens made it possible to get more eggs from them, young shoots of nettle increased milk yield, borsch, cabbage soup, salads, fried eggs were prepared for it etc.
The dioecious nettle plant has been known as a medicinal plant for a long time, Avicenna wrote about its wonderful properties. If you crush its leaves, you can get an excellent styptic. Already from the 16th century, the hemostatic properties of this miraculous plant became the reason that doctors prescribed decoctions of nettles for diseases such as uterine, intestinal and pulmonary bleeding, as well as for abscesses.
Raw materials for the medicine are both leaves and seeds of the plant. It is harvested from June to August, when the flowering process takes place. Knowing the stinginess of nettles, it must be cut off with gloves, although traditional medicine believes that even a nettle burn is very useful.
Then the plant is spread in a dry, ventilated place, dried under a canopy or in the attic, making sure that there is no direct sunlight on the raw materials, otherwise the vitamins will be destroyed.
The leaves of the plant are very useful for food, since dicotyledonous nettles are not inferior to many legumes in calories and nutrition. It contains vitamins K, B1, C, potassium, protein, iron, calcium, formic and silicic acids, fats, glycoside and much more. By the amount of carotene content, nettle surpasses even carrots, and ascorbic acid surpasses black currants.
The miraculous hemostatic property of nettles is due to the content of precisely vitamin K in it, which is found in such quantities in a very small number of plants.
Nettle infusion is an effective tool in the treatment of various bleeding, while reducing the resistance of the human body to external factors. It is prepared as follows: a tablespoon of dried chopped leaves is poured with a glass of boiling water, infused for ten minutes, and after filtering, one spoonful is taken three times a day.
Many doctors and healers believe that nettle is an excellent remedy for metabolic disorders, so they prescribe an infusion for anemia, rheumatism, constipation, atherosclerosis and indigestion.
The nettle is no less popular in cosmetology. It helps to strengthen hair roots, reduces the grease of the fat layer of the scalp, and fights against dandruff. At home, for this purpose, you can simply rinse her hair with a decoction or rub into the scalp.
If you eat dried leaves along with yogurt at the rate of two tablespoons of nettle per glass, then you can lower the blood sugar level and also relieve inflammation in the small intestine.
Dioecious nettle seeds are very helpful for various male problems, increasing potency and sex drive. To do this, they are brewed as tea, and they are also poured with red wine at the rate of 20 grams of seeds in two glasses, insisted for a week and drunk on a spoon a day.
Today in pharmacies you can find briquettes of chopped nettle leaves, slices of which are conveniently poured with boiling water and drink infusion.
However, we must not forget that the use of nettle has its own limitations. It can not be taken by those people who have increased blood coagulability, have gastritis, ulcers, hypertension, as well as pregnant women in the last term.