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!