stinging nettles

[grumblescat]

I need advice on the best way to eradicate stinging nettles, & wild roses. I'm talking acres of both of them. I've tried glyphosate, with limited results. Any ideas....I am concerned about using herbicides, what with the possibility of ground water contamination & effects on wildlife.

I want to replace them with something friendlier to myself and the wildlings....plus something that looks nicer.

Will vinca choke out nettles over time?

Gina

[Chris_W]

Hi Gina,

For the nettles I would try using roundup again, although if that didn't work maybe try a different herbicide. Just spray the leaves, on a dry day without any rain in the forecast, to minimize runoff.

Your only other option is to put on gloves, long sleeve shirt, long pants, and then dig/pull them out by hand. Wait for a cool day to do this.

I doubt that vinca would be able to stand up against them since it is very slow growing and can take years to form a thick enough layer to work well as a weed preventer, and definitely can't kill existing weeds.

I would just try digging the wild roses. They don't have much of a root system, but again, wear skin protection or at least thick leather gloves.

Good luck. We have them in the back of the garden and I dread weeding in that area

[Gruntfuttock]

I don't know if you are aware, but stinging nettles are a very important plant to butterflies over here, and I imagine the same applies over there.

I'm not being an interfering busybody and saying you should keep them or anything, but thought you ought to know in case you didn't.

[KellieD]

Can you get someone in there with a Brush Hog? Repeated mowing will knock them down.

[grumblescat]

A brush hog won't work, the trees are too thick. The roses are in masses about 12 feet high, & yards & yard across, it's a mess.

The nettles are up & down my driveway, which is almost a half mile long, & like I said above, are in between trees.

I don't think I'll be shortchanging the butterflies, I'll still have another 40 acres of nettle filled woods for them to hang out in. The nettles are so bad, that if you try to walk through them, they are so thick, they'll go right through your clothes, they get over 6 feet tall.

I guess as far as the wild roses go, I could crawl under inside the "canopy", cut the canes, & soak the cane ends with glyphosate, maybe that would work, & use less herbicide. Anybody want to wager whether I'll make it back out alive, lol?

[thy]

New leaves are great for a soup..

Easy to dig up early in the spring, nearly impossibel later in the summer....but cut them down with your mover ..no self seeding aloved and dig them early next spring.

And stop peeing the area... they only grow if the area is very well feeded... then they grow by the polution of the air... like dandelions

Dandelions, flies and needles will be the next generation here

[davidpowell]

If I really want to kill something, I drill small holes in the base of it and pour an herbicide into them. It's rather effective at killing pretty much anything, including very old trees.

[DryGulch]

I had them in a raspberry bed and surprisingly used a 6" layer of mulch on April 1. When the nettles finally broke through about June 1I put down another 6" layer of mulch.

Raspberries lived. Nettles did not.

Didn;t think that would work!

[JaneG]

With the round-up type plants, don't cut them. It's most effective when they are actively growing and have lots of leaves to soak up the solution.

We figured this out after a couple years of cutting back the wild things growing in our wild area, and then spraying the remaining stalks and stubble. On tough things like wild grape, they would just pop up from the ground again. So instead, when they are growing like crazy in early-mid summer, we saturate all the growth, including and especially the nice new growth, with Round-Up. Those leaves that are busy growing and providing the plant with sunlight and strength, are also now providing the plant with the toxins, which it keeps sending to the roots. This seems to kill the plant more effectively, but it may take a week for it to show, or on tough things like you are battling, may take a couple applications, but wait a little while between applications.