[cloddopper]

nettle beds that are well matted usually grow on ideal acidic garden soil so if you have the little black nettles or the bigger ones you'll find you  have a great garden once you have taken them out .
 Dealing with a bed is easy if you cut them down to the ground , fork the cuttings to one side for making a hay type tonic feed .
 With the bed  mark it off with twine etc  in 3 foot wide strips and cut along these lines with a spade  digging down at right angles to the surface for at least five inches deep
 start just out side of one end of these strips you've cut and again dig down 5 inches , now use a garden fork to slide four inches in under the nettle root bed and start rolling it back on itself as you  lift the root sytem out .
 every time you ger a decent sized rool you can either leave it in place to dry out and then burn for potash or   move it to a composting area where you'll nbeed to stack thse sausage rools of nettle roots , . One each completed pile cover it in a couiple of layers of thick bakc haylage plastic and dig the edges down inthe ground .

7 or so months  later when you have time to spare you can go back to the covered heaps and sieve them out  remake the sifted material into new heaps and burn the roots you tak out for potash )
Come spring next year these sieved composted heaps can be resieved again to se if any new roots have developed ( if so take them out there & then )  and the fining's spread over the veg area .
 There are not usually many new nettles coming up from it .  But the few that do will be so easy to pull out whilst wearing rubber gloves .
 Sometimes I used this sort of composted roots material as the entire filling content  for my 36 inch high table top seed beds .  Usually sowing all my  transplantable seeds in 1 " wide rings of plastic cut off a three inch dia plastic rainwater down pipe ....so I knew that anything outside a ring was a weed & being white smooth plastic it was easy to use a fine point black Sharpie pen to write what was in each ring before I set it in place  .