Nettles

tringle

I have a large garden (about 1/2 acre) and I have nettles everywhere. How can I get rid of them. I try not to use chemicals so short of digging them up is there another way. We dig up what we can each spring, this is easy enough in the flower and vegetable beds. But the hen run is full of them and at least a third of the garden that was supposed to be a lawn is now just a giant nettle patch. We live in the country so they encroach from the next door field. We did rotivate one area buit that made it eaen worse.
Thanks

Stoner

Just pull them up with gloves get stuck in. Have done this many times and didn't have difficulty with them coming back, they seem to change the soil for the better too making them easy to pull up you'll take the roots most of the time

macraignil

The long roots seem to help the nettle spread and I find its important to dig out all of these when trying to control them.

They are supposed to make a nice soup but you would have to eat a lot of it to make much impact on the numbers in the garden.

Getting something else established on the ground would help stop them coming back. They are damaged by cutting regularly much more than grass so regular mowing will help the grass out compete the nettles.

tringle

Thanks, Im waiting on himself to take the lawnmower out for the season and that will tackle some of them. Some in the beds are loose enough to dig up or pull up but the ones in the hen run are harder. I got some organic weed killer yesterday for the paths and will try that on one or two and see if it does any good. They say its a sign of rich soil and also they only grow on disturbed soil. Our site was a field for a few hundred years at least before we built and we did a lot of disturbing to it. If only the hens would eat them, they eat everything else in the garden except the nettles.