"anton" wrote in message
...

Genie wrote in message ...


The "grassed" area consists of nettles and dandelions, with thin
straggled bits of grass at the edges. The area is shaded by the corner
of the house in the morning, and gets full sun from about 3pm onwards,
so the ground is normally wet underfoot until that point. The area
under the kitchen window gets full sun all day.

I spent a couple of hours last week trying to dig up some of the
nettles at the edge of the "grassed" area to see if it was possible to
remove them without sacrificing what little grass remains. However, I
discovered that there is a web of inch thick nettle roots about 20cm
below the soil surface, and that if I tried pulling them up, the
result looks like the surface of the moon. Am I right in concluding
it's better to redo the lawn from scratch?

Whichever way you decide to go, with so many nettles, it may be worth
knowing how to make nettle manure, its wonderful stuff, cuts down measurably
on the cost of fertilizers and really does work! One word of warning though,
it is stated on the group often about how badly it smells, no description of
the smell really does it justice, it's horrid, but so worth it.

You'll find a link for it (from the urg archive) here

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...cs.demon.co .
uk&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain



Another thing you might think about it containers, don't leave *all* your
work for the next tennants, containers are lovely, you can plant most things
in them including vegetables and you can take them with you when you go.

Good luck with it all.
--

Shan (Ireland)
http://ukdiscus.com/main.htm