Don't grin so hard - the last person living here had a sore back, he was putting nettle poultices on it for years.maybe he's just harvesting - nettles are high in nutrients and anti-oxidants, so he might be getting the next lot of organically grown nettle stems ready for market.
And then dropped dead of bone cancer. In his back. Where he'd been putting the nettles.
Moral - doctors are better than nettles.
Ah, the stories you hear when you have an old house in a fairly tightly-held street where the resident old coots like to gossip
