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If you live in the Pacific Northwest, one of the things you have to deal with is blackberry bushes. I have to fight on a weekly basis to remove blackberry bushes from my yard. They are insidious! The vines lurk under the soil of the yard and spring up where you least expect it and will take any opportunity to spread and are impossible to destroy. Blackberry bushes the cockroach of the plant world. Blackberries have one redeeming quality. The berries are nice. For one month, we pick like crazy and then back to eleven months beating them back.
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Taking Back The Yard

The yard at our old house had been neglected for a while. The previous owners were in the midst of rehabbing the house when they decided to sell. The yard was not their priority. Previous owners were older and hired someone to mow the grass. Everything else was left to go wild. Side yards and sharply sloped areas were completely ignored. Add in a sale closing process that took months and I ended up with practically a wild meadow. For nearly five years, it was mostly wild. The deer had babies in the tall grass near some out of control bushes. They were also living in a 10-foot high blackberry bush growing through four other unidentifiable bushes.

Last summer my focus was on desperately attempting to rehab the house enough to have children in bedrooms and a place to sit at night. The lawn was mowed, but I just didn’t have time for much more with the inside work.  When the contractors finally finished at the end of August, I had to prepare for the house painters. Before they could get to work though, was to remove the blackberry bushes from walls of the garage. It was a nasty, sweaty, painful job. The bushes were about a foot taller than I was.

Every vine is covered with thorns and these vines twine around each other. The vines spread over each other and bury themselves back into the ground. It’s a tangled mess. You have to be cut the vines into multiple pieces to untangle – sure, brute force pulling can work, but mostly it’s a process of “cut – pull”; cut again, pull again; repeat.

Precautions and Tools

If you get ready to tackle one of these bushes make sure you dress the part. A shirt made with a heavy cotton and long sleeves, jeans and leather shoes are needed. If it’s chilly, you can add another layer for more protection. If it’s hot, wait until it’s chilly. That added protection is really nice, those thorns will grab any cloth and penetrate it. Without the thick shirt, I look like I’ve been wrestling a pack of feral cats.

Awesome Tools

What I really want to share are these gloves I found:

Neoprene Coated Work Gloves. These are the best gloves for dealing with blackberry bushes, by far. I know they have some chemical industrial use, but I’ve tried at least a dozen other pairs before I found these. Cloth and leather; budget and expensive… I ended up with scratched and bloody hands with them all. These Neoprene gloves have never been breached by a thorn. I’ve used them for several bush removals over the last three years and they’re still going strong. You can see what the thorns did to the gloves, but inside my hands were perfect. I found them at my local hardware store and they were less than $10. If you’re going to tackling blackberries soon, pick a pair up. You won’t be sorry.

I use Fiskars 28 Inch Bypass Lopper to start cutting. The long handles are perfect cutting vines – no matter how thick- without having to step into the thorns. A good quality clipper, they’ve remained sharp for a couple of years and are still working great. Be sure to leave a bit of a “stump”, so that you can pull the vine out by the roots. Or at least as much as you get. That’s really the key to keeping them from coming back even stronger.

I will be repeating this process many, many times. In fact, the clearing out of blackberry vines encourages new growth. However, repeated clearings will eventually result in a blackberry free area.

*I do not use chemical weed removal for blackberry bushes at this time.*