Nettle Massacre at Oak House

Oh yes, their time has finally come! Cardboard mulch can only go so far in keeping these nettles down, so it's time to bring on the big boys' toys!

First weapon of choice - the Dashel Basher. It might look like a very badly designed golf club, but this cunning disguise hides a swift and effective nettle destroyer.

Its one handed action means those nettles come down almost nonchalantly, with a deadly cool flick of your wrist. And once you've given it a go, you'll quickly find that it's totally addictive! Being by far the best slasher I've ever used on nettles, you just can't stop yourself trying it out on another patch and another and another. It's light weight, fast and surprisingly blunt, so there's not too much risk of causing yourself an injury as you skip gleefully around flattening nettle patches left, right and centre. Within half an hour, we'd cut down enough nettles to almost fill our new compost bin.

And then the next new toy arrived in the post. Oh my goodness, this one ramps it up to a whole new level beyond our wildest nettle-destroying dreams. I kid you not, when this one was finished we had lawn - I'm going to say it again I'm so deliriously chuffed - L A W N !

Ok, so next time it rains I'm sure the nettles will be back, but then we just run over it with our lovely little.. big, hefty, heavy weight, off road tyres, beast of a new lawn mower and it'll be back to lawn again.

So the plan is to keep it up - keep cutting back the nettles with our new toys and then gradually gradually, with no leaves to sustain them, the nettle roots will give up the fight and we'll have lovely cleared patches of ground ready to plant out with more bits of forest garden.