Hello there.
@Greene, here is the full article. It was done in 1899 in Austria. I followed it 100 Percent. The plant is Urtica Dioica, or Stinging Nettle.
"We always had heaps and heaps and heaps of vegetables. Nobody could understand why people with nearby gardens only had scrawny little plants, but the Pfeiffers had huge plants with cucumbers 40 cm. long. "Mr. Pfeiffer," they asked, "how do you do it? What do you do? Are you getting manure from the farmers?" At this time, of course, there was no artificial fertilizer. But I'll tell you what my clever father did. He kept lots of shabby old barrels in the garden. Near the garden was a little stream. Wherever Father saw nettles he picked them: in the woods, by the river, in the garden or the fields, everywhere. You know what nettles are? Wild plants that sting and burn your skin if you brush against them. Father pushed basketfuls of nettles into these old barrels, and brought 30 or 40 liters of water from the river to fill them up. He put on a lid and let the nettles ferment. We had to have the lid because the fermenting nettles smelled like an outhouse. He let it sit. When the fermenting was done, and the water was dark and dirty, but didn't smell so bad anymore, he took off the lid and dipped about 2 1/2 pints of it into a big watering can. This he diluted with pure stream water, and carefully poured on the ground around the stem. He was careful not to get any on the leaves because it would burn them. He never used it on his grafted roses, and he never used it undiluted. It would have been too strong. He used ten parts of water to one part nettle water.
His cauliflowers were so big you couldn't find a bag big enough to go around them. These he took to the Kaiser's rose garden to trade for rose cuttings. He grew all sorts of big vegetables this way. We had too much; so many we couldn't eat them all, even though we eventually fed 12 at our family table every day. So we gave a lot of our excess to friends. We had everything to cook: potatoes, tomatoes, and so many apples! We had so much fruit that we never bothered to pick up what fell on the ground. We had such strawberries!"
I ordered one pound of Stinging nettle leaves off Amazon and I let them ferment in a five gallon bucket with a lid on it, it DID smell awful.
I guess we could work together on this experiment now!
Jared
