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Nettle-choked garden - advice and suggestions welcome
I have recently taken up tenancy in a semi-detatched victorian
labourer's cottage on the entrance track to a farm. The 'garden' consists of a 4x4m patch of "grass" between the house and a huge drainage ditch (there is a holly bush and some other large shrub near the top of the slope down to the ditch that acts as a boundary) and various small borders between the house and the track on the other two sides. The house is roughly square, with a porch built out of the longest side. Poking around in the weeds covering the "grass" I found semi-circular sunken areas of soil in the corners where the porch meets the main wall, which I've assumed are the remains of long-submerged flowerbeds. I spent two evenings a week ago digging out one of those beds, and it's fairly sizeable - a quarter circle of about 1.5m radius on each side of the porch. There are two main areas of gardenable space - the "grass" between the house and the ditch, and a long, thin flowerbed under the kitchen window, parallel to the farm track. There are no delimited boundaries anywhere - not even between our garden and the garden belonging to the tenants next door. I'm assuming the boundary lies at the edge of the area they've mowed and where my weeds begin. The other three sides are bounded by the farm track - which is concreted on one side, and gravelled on the second. 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? I consulted with our landlord, who is willing to run his rotorvator (what is this?) over our "grassed" area, which he says will let us seed the lawn again. However, I'm dubious as to whether this will get rid of the nettles or just distribute their roots more widely round the garden and let them take over even more space. I'm interested in gardening, but my skill and experience are close to zero. I mastered the arts of mowing the lawn and removing pests from the rosebush with a water pistol in our previous house, but not much else. We have a handheld fork and trowel and a pair of gloves, but nothing else in the way of equipment. I'm looking for suggestions/advice on how to deal with the "grassed" area, as we'd like to be able to walk on it in bare feet eventually and sit out there if the weather is nice. Also, any advice on plants would be welcome, since the weeds had completely choked everything in the flower beds once they're removed, I will have a blank slate to work with. I'd like something that's reasonably hardy, as I'm an expert at killing houseplants and would prefer something that has a chance of surviving my tender ministrations. We're intending to live in this house for two years, so something that would produce nice results in that timeframe would also be appreciated - we'll be leaving behind the results of my work for the next tenants, but it would be nice to be able to enjoy it ourselves as well! |
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