A beneficial wild plant : Purple Dead Nettle (Lamium purpureum)

With the coming of spring, purple dead nettle pops up all over our garden!

As I observed, it protects brassicas from slugs and snails, creates a support for fava beans and most important of all,  all kinds of bees love it! They don’t care about other flowers when dead nettle is in bloom!

I let dead nettles grow on the edges  of the garden beds and let the bees have a feast.

When they start to yellow, I chop and drop them in place and they become a wonderful mulch! If they grew on paths, I just step on them and lay them on the ground.

In addition to its wonderful benefits to the garden, it’s edible , packed with vitamins (adds an earthy aroma to salads) and it has medicinal properties: diuretic, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-inflammatory. It can be made into a salve to use later on, or its poultice can be applied directly to wounds.