Grahams vs. the Blackberries

We have blackberries in our backyard. A lot of them. When we bought our house, we knew that they were an eyesore, but we figured "get rid of the blackberries, and instant equity in the house!"

Get Rid Of The Blackberries seemed so easy at the time. Well, we know better now.

I still think that it was a good idea to get the house with the intention of turning a blackberry wasteland into a useable backyard, but it was a heck of a lot of work, and it will be a recurring theme over the next few years.

Step 1: The initial assault: After reading a hundred different websites about getting rid of blackberries, and talking to a hundred different people about their opinion, we had two hundred different possible techniques. We chose to forego spraying the leaves with herbicide once they started growing, in the hopes that we could stem the tide before summer. So we cut them down right away. We rented a 20 cubic yard dumpster, and filled it with Blackberry vines and a couple sagebrush trees that were lurking nearby, and fell likewise under our wrath. We left the vine stalks about 6 inches high, mostly because that was easiest, but also so that we could locate and destroy them more fully later.

Step 2: Dig up the Vines: At first we were just digging them up with the shovel, and that was okay, but it took quite a while per vine.

It was then that I found the optimal device for Blackberry vine removal: The Mattock. It is essentially a battleaxe for lawns. It has a pick on one side, and an axe-blade on the other side oriented like a hoe.


With a Mattock, one can hack at the ground with abandon. The earth breaks up much easier, and the blackberry vines come up equally easy. One gets a bit of dirt down the back of one's shirt occasionally - due to the raising of a dirt-encrusted axe blade over one's head - but that is of small consequence when you see the immense blackberry vines that one is able to wrest from the unforgiving earth.





Step 3: Smothering: The last step that we will be engaging in until next year, is to smother the ground. We found at Costco, a huge roll of landscaping fabric for 30 bucks. We bought two. We also called some tree services that advertised free wood chips, and got on their list. We then took a bag of landscaping lime, and spread it out liberally over the whole area. This is supposed to "sweeten" the soil - raise the Ph level so that the acidity of the soil is much less. The more you can get the soil out of the Acid range, the less hospitable to blackberries it will be.

Next, we spread the landscaping fabric over the whole area, and covered it with the wood chips that were delivered by the tree service. What this is supposed to do is to keep anything from growing under the fabric, kill off the remaining blackberries, and enrich the soil by decomposing, and thereby mulching, any plant material under there. The Fabric is better because it doesn't let sunlight through, but it lets water through. Hopefully, any nutrients from the wood chips will also get under there and next year, we will have soil ready to grow a nice lush lawn.

The blackberries will continue to be a problem, of course. They are persistent, but I think we've got them on the run. We'll continue to look out for them, will be able to identify any interlopers, and will destroy them forthwith.

Stay tuned for more as we have some great stuff coming up, like pictures of our finished bathroom, AND our contribution to the creation of a brand new wetlands area!

This is kind of a continuation of our first post. These are pictures of us tiling our bathroom. More finished pictures of the bathroom are soon to come.

This is a picture of our tub surround with the cement board liner.




James was a big help.



Stephen's handy plumbing


This is our floor tile job most of the way done.




Tune in for more pictures.

Making a usable backyard

In order to get rid of the blackberries and other bad plants (did we mention we had ivy too?) in an environmentally friendly manner we covered the bad portions of our yard with landscaping fabric.



Then we spread lots and lots of woodchips all over the fabric to smother the plants underneath.


We lined the wood chip area with bricks and added interest to the area.



Thats about it for now.

Our Crazy Backyard

So we've been working on our backyard a lot the past couple of months and it has been quite the project, but we've made a lot of progress. I think it's best to start from the beginning. Our backyard was full of everything you can imagine from trees, to brush, to a decomposing couch. I am happy to say we did not find any dead animals or people but other than that, it was in our yard.








We hired a company to come and cut down the six trees. There was a lot of wood and even though it isn't supposed to be very good firewood when we put up a free wood sign it was gone in no time.







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Then we went to town cutting down some sage brush ( which are more or less small trees),
a ton of horrible blackberries, and a lot of unidentifiable weeds and whatnot. Stephen got his new avorite tool the mattock and did some serious damage to blackberry roots.







This is a pile of most of the trash we found in our yard. Buried in the pile are a couple of TVs, a lawn mower, and some tires. I'll post pictures of the finished parts of our yard soon. Keep checking in.


These are a small portion of the plastic planters that we found in the ground. Apparently the people who owned the house before us didn't know that you're supposed remove the plant from the planter before putting in the ground.

Day one of home ownership

(this post actually from an e-mail sent at the time)



Actually it's really day 3, but we both had shows over the weekend, so Monday, February 12th was the first day setting foot in the house as owners.

Update: We closed finally on February 9th in the midst of a huge Microsoft Event where I was doing 10-12 hour days every day of the week. Luckily the escrow company was good, and so was the bank, so everything was ready to go beforehand. Went smoothly, no problems.

So Day One: The Bathroom was way crappy, so we're remodeling it entirely. We need a bathroom to work when we move in, so we need to get this done before our lease is up at the apartment.

Anyway, we jumped in head first. Lauren actually had the crappy tub surround down before I even got there with the camera.

Take a look at the pics: Note the Tub and Toilet and Vanity and WALL and vinyl floor that all exist in the before pics above that all don't exist in the after pics below! I can't believe I'm allowed to do this.

More to come soon!

Steve

The New House

Lauren and I wanted a way to share our experiences with our new house with everyone. A blog seemed a nice way to do that.

Check back every once in a while for pictures and stories of our triumphs and screw-ups and the things we learn. It has already been exciting and frustrating and gratifying and scary. We hope it'll at least be interesting for you.

Hopefully you'll be able to see this little house become a beautiful home with us.

Thanks for joining us.

Stephen and Lauren