Midwestern Eastern Deciduous Forest summer

Late spring (mid-May) in the Eastern Deciduous Forest at Indian Creek Nature Center near Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Notice how sunny the forest floor is due to the trees not being entirely leafed out.

Summer (late June) in nearly the same location at the Indian Creek Nature Center as the  picture above.  Notice the forest is much darker due to the trees being leafed out.  Not so noticeable in this picture is the thicker summer vegetation.

Summer in the eastern deciduous hardwood forest is quite different from the spring.  Spring can be cool and wet with plenty of sunshine hitting the forest floor (click here for a post on the spring forest).  Come June though, the trees have completely leaved out and the once sunny forest floor can become quite shady, often with only about 5% of sun hits the forest floor.  Spring forest wildflowers disappear and are succeeded by a thicket of more heat and shade tolerant herbaceous plants. While spring forbes can be quite pleasant and easy to hike through, summer forbes are a lot more itchy and on the defense.  Plants like Stinging Nettles and Poison Ivy are extremely abundant and can make a short hike quite painful.  The mosquitoes can also add to this pain and humid warm air (typically in the 80's) can also make this a sweaty experience.  Enough of the negative though!  The forest is quite a refuge from the summer heat and sun.

While the summer forest can be quite itchy,It is quite a refuge from the summer heat and sun.  It is also one of the most wondrous and active habitats around.  If I were to describe the summer forest in one word it would simply be GREEN.  Absolutely everything is beautifully green.  The forest floor is green with mosses and a thick layer of bushes and leafy plants.  Above, smaller understory trees like elms, dogwoods, and ironwoods are green.  Towering higher, canopy trees like oaks, maples, walnuts, ash and hickory's form another thick green layer.  Each of these layers of green is also full of life, which can often be difficult to see due to thick vegetation.  Birds of all types, Cardinals, Indigo Buntings, Cat Birds, Turkeys, Warblers, Gnat Catchers, Ducks among many others fly through out the layers of vegetation and fill the woods with songs all day long.  Whitetail deer, rabbits, and squirrels also abound.

The forest floor as well as the understory are also full of berries this time of year.  Black Raspberries, Dogwood Berries, Mulberries, Chokecherries, and Goose Berries are quite an abundant food supply for forest life or the hiker who can positively identify the plants.  These plants produce their fruit in hopes that some passing animal will eat them and carry the seeds to new locations.

Chokecherries

Goose Berries

Black Raspberries

All of this greenness and abundant berry production continues until fall when the weather cools off and drys out.  Once berry production ends, an abundance of nuts that grow on trees throughout summer, including acorns, walnuts, and hickory nuts, ripen and fall off the trees.  But until then, forest life has plenty of time to gather the abundance of the summer forest and relax in the shade until fall and winter when things become harsher.

Medicinal herbal tea: Stinging nettles

In the interest of the Stinging Nettles project I am working on a coworker gave me some organic nettle leaf tea from traditional medicinals to try out.  Being that stinging nettles are full of all kinds of medicinal chemicals it would be very logical to expect nettles to have medicinal benefits.  Some of these medicinal chemicals are anti-inflammatory and have been shown to reduce joint point and allergy symptoms.  Another compound called formic acid is a known anti-bacterial.  Serotonin a hormone associated with feelings of love and happiness is also found in nettle.  As a medicinal product however, Nettles are mostly commonly prescribed to alleviate environmental allergy symptoms.

So with this all in mind, along with my allergies, I have tested out this tea several times in the past few weeks.  First off, the tea is a sort of brownish color with a slight green tinge to it.  Taste wise I would say it is neither bad nor good, but definitely easy to drink with no overpowering flavors.  Also, no real aftertaste.  I tried several different steep times ranging from three to ten minutes.  Medicinally ten minutes is probably most beneficial.  As for medicinal results I would say it definitely helps with mild allergy symptoms most of the time and will partially alleviate more harsh allergies sometimes.  As for making me feel happy or in love anything like that I don't know...  This is just my own personal experience but it aligns with much of the scientific research on the effects of stinging nettles.

As with all wild foods such as stinging nettles make sure you have absolute positive identification of the plant.  Check and cross check with experts, books, and the internet.  In the case of prepackaged herbal teas you don't have to worry about identification, its already been done for you.  Once the plant has been positively identified taste a small amount and wait several hours to make sure you do not have an allergic reaction.  Then taste again and wait awhile, if you don't have an allergic reaction go ahead and try it.

Stinging nettles are actually useful?!?!

Growing up in the Midwest I learned very quickly in my camping, fishing, and hiking excisions what stinging nettles where and avoided them as much as possible.  I found them much easier to identify and avoid then poison ivy which I managed to get every summer for four years in my childhood.  After those four years I learned my lesson and haven't had is since.  But for all the effort I and others put into avoiding stinging nettles I never guessed some people would actually find them useful.  In-fact, some people find them one of the most useful plants available.  Weird but true.

In looking into this I came across the book "101 Uses for Stinging Nettles" by Piers Warren.  The book is pretty interesting.  Some of the more interesting uses in the book are: fertilizer, insecticides, tea, all kinds of food uses, fiber for rope and clothing, and numerous medical uses.  A lot of these 101 uses are folk lore but a lot are also based on actual uses that have been around for centuries.  The usefulness of this plant appears to me to be pretty amazing.  The book prompted me to purchase nettle seeds which I will be planting in my garden this spring so I can test out a lot of these different uses.  So in coming months, as the nettles grow, I will post the results for some of these nettle uses.  I'll test them out to see if its true.

Here is an article on nettles I came across a while back.  Apparently nettle ferments and new publications on nettles are somehow illegal in France (according to this article).  Weird.

“Mysteriously” Banned in France: Nettles, Hot water and Indispensable Garden Tips

Here is another article on nettle ferments:  Nettles to the rescue

Stinging nettle plant (Urtica dioica)

Stinging nettles typically grow in areas of very wet soil and form dense thickets like this.