Nettles are popping up all over the island right now. They make a free and easy spinach substitute in recipes calling for cooked spinach, since heat disarms the nettles' sting. Add to that their long-held reputation as a detoxifier and a potent source of vitamin C and iron and you have just what you need to purge the winter blahs.

Don’t touch them with your bare hands when they’re raw; you'll get a sting that will last for hours. Put long rubber gloves on and snip off a big bag full of nettle tops. I usually use the first two or three leaf pairs, depending on how young the nettles are. Gather a lot of them; they shrink down like spinach. Keep those gloves on until the sting has been cooked out of the nettles, which only takes about a minute of blanching to do.

Jerry Traunfeld (formerly of the Herbfarm) has my favorite all time nettle soup recipe, with lovage and mussels. Persephone Farms often offers stalks of lovage around Mother's Day, and it's also very easy to grow and hardy around here. But if it's not available, the internet is full of simpler nettle soup recipes, like this one from Bainbridge's own Greg Atkinson. And master forager Fergus Drennan offers a soup recipe that combines nettles with wild garlic. Of course locally farmed garlic will work just as well.