Nettles: removal and disposal options

hi all, I have a large patch of nettles in an old composting section of my garden (at least 15x15m). Needless to say the rich soil has proved a paradise for the nettles. Given it's a composting site I really want to avoid hardcore chemicals.

I have a gardener/maintenance chap who has suggested if we don't want to go down the chemical route then he'd propose to scrape them out with a digger, dig a big hole and burry them a good meter or so below the surface.

Or is manually digging them out one by one the only option?

Regularly mowing the area down is another idea but I don't know if this actually kills them off or if they go into some kind of plant hibernation?

thanks!

 

Hi AlexP,

What are planning on doing with the area?

Nettles are brilliant for butterflies, it's where they lay there eggs. You can also submerge nettles in water for a few weeks and use the liquid as a feed. You may want to keep small patch if possible.

Rusty

 

Nettle soup, great plant food!

 

And cut the tops and put onto compost bin, but not the roots

 

Personally I reckon mowing is the only way to go.

You could spray it with roundup which breaks down to starch when it comes into contact with soil, thus not poisoning the ground, but if it is ground that you can mow, I'd just mow it.

If you spray it, sure you'll kill it off, but then you'll still have to mow it to clear it afterwards. Also unless you use a nasty residual weed killer, it'll just come back because there'll be literally millions of seeds on the ground.

So I think just regular mowing. Eventually the nettles will weaken and the grass will dominate.

 

Great advice from@clueless1

If you're going down the dig-out route, expect an ongoing challenge. The yellow roots/rhizomes are incredibly challenging to remove as they become very fine the further they spread outwards or downwards, so inevitably break no matter how hard you try to remove them, therefore tiny fragments left behind will regerate clones of the parent plants. Keep digging them up whenever they re-appear.

If you don't want a lingering herbicide, mowing regularly to deprive them of photosyntheis will kill them off eventually. I've never seen a lawn with nettles in unless it's next to a bank of nettles or has been seriously neglected.

Another alternative is to cover the ground with a thick membrane, dark plastic sheeting - or even a thick layer of newspapers, weighed down with gravel or bark chippings. But this will take a long time to kill them completely..... and takes a lot of patience

 

There is, or rather was, a big clump of nettles in the neglected "garden" next door, I sprayed them with SBK scrub and brushwood killer and it seems to have done the job.
Any young ones I find in my own garden (they have probably arrived from next door!) I just pull up.

 

ok thanks all, so eventually the roots will breakdown and not reappear if you inhibit growth through mowing?

@clueless1 the seeds - surely they all spout up in their first year? just thinking of living through one year's worth of pain and then it'll all be sorted?

@rustyroots this part of the garden (more grounds tbh as is so big) is for composting/disposal of garden waste. Don't worry we've plenty of nettles elsewhere so don't won't effect wildlife much

 

I wouldn't think of it as pain. If it's going to be lawn, you'll be mowing it regularly anyway presumably.

 

Of late, I've been turning more and more against the use of any form of weedkillers, mainly because I dont believe that available information is not tainted by the desire of big companies to make obscene profits.

So why not simply burn the...err...little tinkers out with a propane blowtorch? Cheap, effective and fun... (cue evil laugh!)