I'd leave the nettles in the countryside and waste ground. There's plenty of them out there. I have nettles but if I had a small urban garden I wouldn't consider them. Supposing you did have all those lovely dangly black caterpillars on your nettle. Where would they go when they'd eaten that one? A good crop of caterpillars can eat more than one tub of nettles.
here we use to have a abundance of butterflies they use to fill the buddleia s and were here for many years in numbers,but now i am lucky if I see one.Since gardens have become tidier and less and they built on the playing fields the decrease in numbers has been dramatic.What ever the reason ,I have tried growing all butterfly loving plants and nettles(they are useful),the numbers have never recovered.
The wider habitat has been lost flowering rose. I grow lots of stuff and I do have butterflies but not in number. Anything I do is limited by living surrounded by an agricultural desert with everything except the crop of the moment srayed to extinction. Sprays for insects, sprays for slugs, sprays for god knows what. The sprayer was out there twice in the last week.
Gardens should create wildlife corridors but they are, as you say, too tidy for that
I have aclump of nettles behind GH. I also have aclover lawn, year before last the quantity of bees was amazing, last year very few It could well have been the weather
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I'd leave the nettles in the countryside and waste ground. There's plenty of them out there. I have nettles but if I had a small urban garden I wouldn't consider them. Supposing you did have all those lovely dangly black caterpillars on your nettle. Where would they go when they'd eaten that one? A good crop of caterpillars can eat more than one tub of nettles.
In the sticks near Peterborough
here we use to have a abundance of butterflies they use to fill the buddleia s and were here for many years in numbers,but now i am lucky if I see one.Since gardens have become tidier and less and they built on the playing fields the decrease in numbers has been dramatic.What ever the reason ,I have tried growing all butterfly loving plants and nettles(they are useful),the numbers have never recovered.
The wider habitat has been lost flowering rose. I grow lots of stuff and I do have butterflies but not in number. Anything I do is limited by living surrounded by an agricultural desert with everything except the crop of the moment srayed to extinction. Sprays for insects, sprays for slugs, sprays for god knows what. The sprayer was out there twice in the last week.
Gardens should create wildlife corridors but they are, as you say, too tidy for that
In the sticks near Peterborough
I have aclump of nettles behind GH. I also have aclover lawn, year before last the quantity of bees was amazing, last year very few
It could well have been the weather