stinging nettles

Grandpa was one of my people. He's been in heaven for awhile now but he's still one of my favorite people. I have only happy memories of Grandpa. He was a creative man who believed in hard work and child labor. Me and my sister Jill LOVED to play in the orchard. And there is nothing as good as fruit straight from the tree. It was right next to the pasture and full of friut trees. Back then it looked huge and we would be in there playing for hours and hours. Sometimes we would hide in there, and  throw apples at passing cars until one stopped, then we would run like mad to the safety of the grain silo. Somtimes we would pick all the fruit we could reach and throw that to the cows. Grandpa would come out and give us mad eyes, "you arn't picking those apples off the tree are you?" I'm sure he already knew the answer but we thought we were smart so we would lie. "No Grandpa! These were all on the ground!" Nevermind the bottom of the tree had been striped bare of all the fruit.
The only down side of playing in the orchard was it had a lot of stinging nettles. They grew in there like crazy. Grandpa had little rakes that were our size and he would tell us, "if you want to play in there you have to rake all the nettles." So with rakes in hand we would go out and spend hours (we were five) raking the nettles out of the orchard. When we were done we would have a little tea party and eat pomaganets till it got dark. We would go to Grandma itching at the end of the day. We were covered in welts that required iodine because we wern't smart enough to put on long pants. While Grandma was making sure we were sufficantly coated Grandpa would just sit there and smile. No apples were thrown at passing cars or cows and he got the orchard de-nettled for free. The man was brilliant!