Blackberries, anyone?

[prosodic]

This is how bad the blackberries have gotten in less than a year...so bad, that Lance could open up the back gate last September and walk back through the wooded area behind our yard...now, forget about it. Huge nasty prickly vines everywhere.

We now have a machete. Twenty-two inches of cold, razor-sharp steel. And a bottle of herbicide made specifically for blackberry plants.

Even though I wanted Lance to wait until the berries were out of season, he insisted on doing it now. He let me pick what I could get first. I just couldn't get very far. It's madness back there, I tell you!

I took before pictures. I'll take more pictures after the plants start to die and he starts hacking away at them with the machete. That will be sometime next month. So...I better enjoy my tiny blackberry harvest because it's the only one I'm going to get. Thankfully, I'm not a huge fan of them. I much prefer raspberries and blueberries.

And to think, this is one of those things that native Pacific Northwesterners love...all the wild blackberries. I don't find them so charming when the brambles snake their way through the fence and start taking over the yard.

Now that "Operation KILL TEH EVIL!" is in full effect, we won't be starting Johnson's Blackberry Jam Factory.

Keep in mind with these pictures, there ARE trees back there...somewhere.

Pictures:

Comments

[navygreen.livejournal.com]

This is sadness of immeasurable quantity for me. I love blackberries. I was raised in the country in TX, and we had acres of them. My sisters and I would pick a gallon/day while in season, and my mom would store them in our walk-in freezer. She made cobblers and pies all year long. Blackberries are probably my very favorite berry on the planet, and sadly, I've never found good stashes of them anywhere I've lived since TX (WV, AK, and now NE).

:-(

[prosodic.livejournal.com]

I had no problem with them at all until they grew so out of control that they run the risk of destroying my other plants. We're are not planning to completely get rid of them, but at least clear a few feet of brambles behind the fence, in the hopes that they won't encroach on our yard any further.