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clearing blackberries | (Read 1850 times) |
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rachael hamblin
Posts: 129
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April 30, 2008, 11:24:11 PM |
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We have a whole strip of yard that is completely inaccessible/unusable due to being choked with blackberries. I'd like to get it cleared out but don't feel like taking a week chopping at them, which I can imagine would ultimately be pretty futile anyway....I'm tempted to try to burn them out but I can see several problems with this. Are there other strategies for removing large patches of invasive blackberry?
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paul wheaton
Administrator
Posts: 4475
missoula montana
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May 01, 2008, 09:33:47 AM |
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Far more entertaining to use a machete!
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permaculture.dave
Posts: 255
Orcas Island, WA
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May 01, 2008, 05:08:56 PM |
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A crew of our interns just cleared a strip of blackberries to make room for pear trees. They got in there and whacked away with brush hooks and machetes until the canes were gone. Then they went through with picks and pulled up all the crowns. I think this is the only way I know of to really get the job done. I suppose you could sheet mulch instead of digging crowns, but you'd still need to do the mechanical clearing.
Oh! You could rent a bobcat for an hour and remove them that way too. Plus it trumps Paul's idea of entertaining!
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rachael hamblin
Posts: 129
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May 01, 2008, 11:41:43 PM |
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Ah, that idea about the picks helps a lot. Does that pretty much take care of things or do they still keep coming up for a while?
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paul wheaton
Administrator
Posts: 4475
missoula montana
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May 02, 2008, 09:16:28 AM |
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While I usually favor sheet mulching over digging, I think blackberries could push past almost any sheet mulch.
I've heard of a lot of people having success by chopping it all down and then putting goats in the area. Every time a blackberry sprout comes up, the goats gobble it up!
Dave, if you're gonna bring in the machinery, howzabout a bush-hog?
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Susan Monroe
Posts: 1093
Western WA
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October 15, 2008, 05:06:26 PM |
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Goats and donkeys love blackberry vines, and you don't have to chop them down first.
The trouble is going to be keeping them down. I think it was in one of Bill Mollison's books where he reported that a farmer had a gully full of wild blackberry plants that he wanted cleaned out. He threw bales of hay into the gully and gave his cattle access. They chewed down and trampled the vines while going after the hay. As soon as he saw the vines coming up again, he threw more hay down there. After 30 years, he admitted that the blackberries were winning.
Sue
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paul wheaton
Administrator
Posts: 4475
missoula montana
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June 09, 2009, 06:44:04 PM |
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Earlier this year there was a showing of Sepp Holzer videos in Woodinville. Five permies were asked to sit at the front as a sort of panel. It was me, Dave, Albert Posthema, another Paul (a friend of Dave's who hasn't been to permies.com) and Marilene (she posts here under an alias).
Somebody asked us what to do to get rid of blackberries.
And we had five different answers.
I liked Dave's - throw your apple cores and the like into the blackberry patches. Eventually the trees will outcompete the blackberries.
Marilene's answer was to pick the blackberries and make pies. Then arrange with arborists to bring loads of alder wood chips in exchange for pies. Cut the canes and then cover with 18 inches of wood chips.
I cannot remember what the other Paul said. Nor can I remember what Albert said.
My response was to put a string of electric around the blackberries and then run pigs in there.
And now ... here comes the good part ... this is me feeding my ego in my obnoxious way ....
A couple of weeks after that event, Sepp Holzer was in town giving a talk. At the end there was a bit of Q & A and somebody asked this exact question. His answer: "put a string of electric around the blackberries and then run pigs in there."
Ahhhhhh .... validation ....
And then somebody asked what if you don't have pigs? Sepp said "then you have to do the pigs work!" and went on to the next question.
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adunca
Posts: 35
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June 09, 2009, 11:43:16 PM |
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If you don't have equipment or livestock, here is how I get rid of blackberries. I have tried many methods on my half acre of blackberries, and this is what works best for me (my berries are mostly on an uneven slope). I will assume that the blackberries are well established, with a typical thickness of 8 feet or so.
Tools:
- 2 - 2x6 or 2x8 boards that are 10-12 feet long
- Hand hedge shears, well sharpened
- Heavy leather gloves
1. Decide what you are going to plant to replace the blackberries. If you don't have a plan for this, there is no point in trying to remove the berries because they will just come back.
2. The best time to do this is in the early spring, after a winter with lots of ice and/or snow. The weight of the ice/snow compresses the vines a bit, making the job easier. I have actually done this during heavy snow, the weight of the snow really helps.
3. At the edge of the berries, lean the board into the vines, trying to make it flat enough to walk on.
4. Walk up the board. Your weight will compress the vines quite a bit. You may have to jump up and down a bit to get them to go down. If this makes you uncomfortable (you feel like you might fall off), use the second board as well, or a single, wider board. If you are a small person, have a friend stand on the board with you. The first time you walk up the board it may be quite steep, but after this it will be less steep.
5. Throw the second board on top of the vines a couple of feet from the first board.
6. Step onto or climb up the second board, using your weight to compress the vines.
7. Repeat this process until you have "squashed" all the vines. If you are on a slope it is obviously easiest to start at the top and work your way down. Once they are all squashed, you can walk around on top of them. The more you do this, the more they will be squashed.
7. Using the hedge clippers, cut off the vines as close to the root as possible. Don't worry about getting all the vines, just get the ones you can easily reach. If you close the clippers, you can slip the tip down into the vines, open it just enough to get around your target, and chop it.
8. Wait until the vines start growing. You will see the vines you missed because they will have new growth. Cut the vines that have new growth.
9. Wait for the vines to die. Keep cutting the ones you missed.
10. If you are in kind of a hurry and have good upper body strength, at this point the berries will probably be just flat enough that you can pull (not push) a lawnmower over them. Remove the bag and close the door. You don't want to blow chunks of blackberry vine into your legs or your face. The first time you do this it is really hard, but you will get instant gratification from seeing the berries chopped to smithereens.
11. At this point you can either A) keep mowing the resprouts (which is what I do), B) spray or paint the resprouts (which requires very little herbicide), or C) dig out the roots. I would only do C) if you are in a big hurry. If you keep doing any of these methods, the blackberries will eventually lose. But you will have to be vigilant for a few years to pull, spray or mow the sprouts - the soil is going to be filled with berry seeds, plus animals will aways be dropping more on the site.
Of course this will go much faster if you have friends helping you. And if you have access to a tractor, bobcat, etc. it will be a piece of cake.
I agree that goats would do the job just fine. But I don't have goats (I live in town).
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rose macaskie
Posts: 1021
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July 03, 2009, 06:58:57 AM |
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I like cutting out black berries, I like jobs that continue the same for hours, I imagine them to be calming and mentally healthy, if they aren't your only occupation and this one exercises my arms so it would keep me fiscally healthy too if i was in the country all the time.
They are interesting, they are like ladders that put out spokes in every direction, this means that they can hook on to the black berry next door and instead of having a sort of one fine legged bird bath structure they have the legs of their fellow blackberries, they have a table many legged structure.-
If you try to get into there centre stems and cut the whole piece down at once you will get scratched, you have to go through the different layers of blackberries till you have bared the centre.
they create a lot of shade so i don't feel particularly purist anti desert person when i cut them out, i think i would achieve the jungle in the desert quicker if i left them in but i could not walk round the garden.
I like to have some to provide a safe place for birds to nest in.
I find the ones that live in walls are hard to get rid of but the ones that come up from the ground seem very put off if i cut them down.
Maybe this is due to the long hot summers, they can't take being cut down and the heat, this may not be true in a less extreme climate.
I have taken earth back from my garden to use in my pots and the percentage of black berries that grow in it is big, so maybe it is not so much that black berries grow back from their roots as that there tend to be so many blackberry seeds in the soil.
I sometimes dig up the main part of their roots after cutting them down.
I like making myself do a good stretch of phisical work though.
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rose macaskie
Posts: 1021
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July 04, 2009, 03:08:02 PM |
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Brenda Groth Its tremendous the way the tips of blackberries sprout roots in autumn, it scares me a bit, i read a short story about a woman whose garden was a sort of nightmare to much for her, and the roots coming out of blackberry tips great spray of white roots always makes me tihink of that story.
tell me how to prune the i don't want to look it up and if yours are yum then you must be good at it. anyway i'll have something to compare anything i read about it with.
I dont believe i could persuade my neighbors to buy blackberries, they are really good at vegetable gardening they would beat me silly at selling blackberries, its only the pastures land they leave absolutely bare they go out and take earth from under the trees in the mountain for their gardens, thats one of the reasons the pastures are terrible, though i don't believe it could make much difference. rose macaskie.
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rose macaskie
Posts: 1021
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July 04, 2009, 05:42:28 PM |
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Gosh I have raspberries and they have started to run but i haven't had them for long enough to find that they are unstoppable. I shall move them to where theres no watering and hope that stops them.
I don't know how the weather is with you, on the other side of the Atlantic. The south of Texas seems pretty good and its on the same longitude as the Sahara desert. and here in Madrid its about New york level. I am not sure what the weathers like in New York state but when i whatch cnn weather it is obviouse that the waweather in north america is different from the weather in parts of europs on the same level. I'm not great on geography, maybe i have got it all wrong.
I cut the brambles with long stemmed pruners or hedge cutters. I can imagine them getting all tangled up with brush hooks and swinging around and tearing my skin with their thorns, but men sometimes go in for the savage.
It must be great having bears. We have two or three in the North of Spain but no chance of bumping into one in the lanes round about here, you would have to go up the mountains in the north to see them.
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rose macaskie
Posts: 1021
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July 05, 2009, 12:25:46 PM |
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In answer to Brenda Groths message on how far north she lives.
Gosh, how do you grow anything with frosts like that . England was a soft fruit place though i don't think the english climate is that hard on trees at least not unless they try to grow southern climate trees. Do you have maples where you live maples is one of the subjects i have tried to understand because i was trying to understand sap flow in trees and remembered about mapls syńrup and tapped maple syrup into the computer to see if i could not find out more from the producers of maple sugar and i did.
Where my house is, there are fairly late frosts and they start early in the year because it is at a thousand metres abocve sea level. The sun is strong here, and ththe ground is really overgrazed and holds little water. My neighbors have better earth in their vegetable plots than i but they have smaller plots, the man who sold me mine sold me a lot of land for a garden. They do bare the land except in their vegetable patches, for fear of fires and that makes it barren, no plants no vegetable matter rotting in the earth, that produces nitrogen or the animals pass over the land quiclky because there is not much to eat and so don't fertilize it much. The dry eseason is july - August but it may start in jume and end at the beginging of november though it usualy rains in october. The drought in summer is tremendouse and the heat, 40 degrees centigrade for example.
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rose macaskie
Posts: 1021
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July 07, 2009, 09:51:39 AM |
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brenda Groth, hi, i only have to decide i will eat a plant for iti to disappear. It happened to me with stinging nettles, I only had a few, and burs of the burdock plant, ithe roots are good, i started to eat them and what seemed to be the beging of an invasion stopped., Maybe your blackberries don't get out of hand because you eat them. I like mine but being wild many are way out of my reach.
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rose macaskie
Posts: 1021
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July 07, 2009, 10:03:57 AM |
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One thing to be said in defense of blackberries is that they do shade things a lot, I wanted to have permie type habits, except my inspiration was Jesus Charcos story about cemetries shut to the public if saint where buried in them that turned into jungles. Islamic saints are meant to create hundreds of miles of green, the hundred is a rough approximation of what i once read, a number i can't remember but think included at l least one thousand, I wanted to create a jungle, but i wanted to walk round the garden and so Icut out the blackberries in many places and though they seemed a stringy set of of enmeshment of intermeshed stalks with a few leaves, i am thinking of those those that had not bushed out but where getting as tall as possible in the shade of willows. When i cut them down i found i had let in an awfull lot of sun. Here the sun is too strong to need encouraging. i had greatly reduced the jungle effect.
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