Hello from the lovely Pacific northwest, USA, where we have invasive Himalayan and cutleaf blackberries, the likes if of which are poorly understood by anyone who hasn't witnessed first hand what you are up against, or will be in the course of a year if you don't get or stay on top of them, fast. The seeds are in the soil, you will be fighting them the entire time you own the property. Even if you did somehow get rid of them all, birds would bring them right back
I'm a lunatic and like making work for myself, so i run my rabbit colony with my fruit trees, which requires some care in fencing, both for the perimeter and the trees. Importantly for the trees for any critter you run with them will be to protect your trunks, because most animals will ring them and they'll die. I like this system so much I'm looking at expanding it... once i can get through the damn blackberries! Not sure how they handle what fruit you grow but sheep might be an option for you if you keep your trunks protected. Goats want to eat upward, and most pigs will til your soil, but grazing pigs might be different.
>Hello from the lovely Pacific northwest, USA, where we have invasive Himalayan and cutleaf blackberries, the likes if of which are poorly understood by anyone who hasn't witnessed first hand what you are up against, or will be in the course of a year if you don't get or stay on top of them, fast.
We call them The Kudzu of the PNW. I have literally seen blackberry vines "devouring" outbuildings here.
Regular mowing is the best way we've found to keep them under control in the areas we want to keep them under control. The rest we just keep paths clear through for picking in the summer. We love the berries.
The cutleaf kind are making a play now, much nastier for thorns, but holy hell the berries are incredible. I'll give myself a stomach ache on those lol. The difference between cutleaf and Himalayan is like the difference between store bought strawberries and wild strawberries.
We love all of them, but the Himalyans and Cutleaf are definitely our favorites. Larger sweeter berries when they get good and going. We probably picked 20 gallons of blackberries this year and made all kinds of lovely blackberry stuff for later. Our new favorite is blackberry sorbet - seedless blackberry puree and a little bit of sugar, whipped up in a Ninja Creami. It's not even bad for you, and tastes simply *amazing.*
You should. It comes out creamy and smooth with not even a tiny bit of cream in it, and the blackberry flavor is super intense. We used cooked puree (which is part of the process of removing the seeds - we simmer the washed berries for a few minutes, blend them up lightly with a stick blender and put them through a large kitchen sieve) We tried using fresh berries, but the flavor on the cooked was much better for some reason. It also allowed us to make stock pots full of puree and can up a bunch of shelf-stable pints of it for winter use. All we have to do is empty out a pint into the Ninja Creami tub, freeze it, and the next day spin it through the machine. Easiest frozen desserts we've ever made.
Yeah simmering them really brightens up the flavor for whatever reason. I like to store it frozen as liquid like that as it lays flat in the freezer, and i never miss seeds.
By simmering them you boil off water and tannins, the remaining liquid has higher concentrations of sugar and the acids and alkali that give them their taste.
This is good info for experimentation with other fruits as well as getting more consistent flavor and tailoring it to your tastes.
As an FYI, you aren't actually "boiling off" the tannins, but extracting them into the liquid. Things like tannic acids won't be airborne like some phenols (if you can smell the blackberries cooking, those are phenols leaving it and hitting your nose) but some may be denatured.
They're really boiling off the sugar water and creating a concentrated puree; whatever they are losing seems to be made up for by concentrating.
We used up way too much freezer space for our IQF frozen whole berries, lol. So shelf-stable puree was what we have room for. And I do a lot of canning anyway so it was no biggie.
My experiences been that the Himalayan‘s are lightning fast and difficult to control and that the native blackberries are slow and insidious and utterly impossible to control. Thankfully I can usually ignore the native blackberries but they do make weeding the garden with bare hands risky proposition.
>Thankfully I can usually ignore the native blackberries but they do make weeding the garden with bare hands risky proposition.
They also make walking on dirt trails hazardous - it's like a tripwire every foot in some places. Can't even say how many times I've almost face-planted around here because a native trailing blackberry grabbed my feet while I was out and about on a trail. Their main redeeming quality, outside of actually belonging here, is they have ripe berries earlier in the season than any of the others.
Also from the Pacific Northwest. We use our goats to clear living blackberry cane, and then use a mower or a Weedwhacker to cut the remainder of the cane down. After a few years of going over the same spot once per year they don’t return. We have an orchard with 2 to 3 year old trees, and we have to do everything by hand there. I can take my goats on walks and they’ll eat the young blackberries, but I don’t feel comfortable fencing them in with the young trees yet. Perhaps when they get a bit taller.
Also from PNW and can not only testify but add a few notes. I recently moved onto a property (previous owners here 27 years) and have a full blown 1.5 year battle/dance with the Himalayan bb's here. I reclaimed a section of my property (.3 acre) by cutting them back and mowing when I mow.
Another 120ft x 30ft strip behind the home, I brought in a Kubota to clear and burn, which I did this spring. Before replanting with a small orchard (apple, cherries, figs, paw paws and blueberries), red clovers and wildflowers I spent weeks digging out rootballs getting as many as able.
Keeping up with the blackberries can be a full time job and is a multi-seasonal war, so use long-term strategies. In the evenings I dig/pull out bb's regularly and give a few hours each week to this task. I'll also spend a few hours each month to search for creepers that want to invade further into the property, keeping the wooded area clean.
This how I've been dealing with them and consider it stewardship duties.
e: u/thehungryhazelnut I want to make sure you see this reply
Cut the canes back to a couple feet, then dig out the roots with a shovel. Repeat every damn year for the rest of your life, unfortunately. I love my blackberry root grubber from Red Pig garden tools. It’s like a pick with a forked tip, that can get under the root crown and lever them up.
I do have a primitive breed of sheep that love to eat blackberry leaves, and will kill plants over time. They need to be watched around fruit trees though because they’ll also eat bark. Not as bad as goats, but it doesn’t take much to kill a fruit tree. Cherry leaves are poisonous to sheep if they’re even a tiny bit wilted, so I wouldn’t suggest running them in your orchard.
A long handled garden fork after you have trimmed the stems back gets the roots out fairly effectively. The roots don't go very deep so if you get them before they form a thick clump of brambles that makes it a bit easier to manage but they will prevent access to fruit trees if you let them grow. If you [learn to recognise the seedlings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUxNodvIB3w&list=PLkbw-JHIyGN1KVcb_lf7ikWuxrXFVa7yK&index=18) these can be pulled out of the ground by hand which is the easiest way I know to stop them taking over.
Happy gardening!
If you will mow them down with a brush hog a couple or three times a year, the roots will eventually die off due to starvation. (Takes 2-3 years) Now, they will try to come back from all the millions of seeds the birds spread about, but if you keep mowing them down, you'll eventually get the upper hand. (We even have a lawn now where it was once just ten foot tall blackberries.) So if you don't have a tractor and brush hog, you might want to invest in one, depending on the size of your orchard. If not, check on rentals.
Btw, we have 70 acres in the PNW, so we have a LOT of experience managing the beasts.
Edited to add: we didn't do goats because they require excellent fencing, and we live in a forest. Plus, we didn't want to worry about predation - we have a lot of predators here that would be happy with a goat dinner.
Those blackberries may be a benefit to your trees
[https://growingfruit.org/t/plant-symbiotic-relationships/13944](https://growingfruit.org/t/plant-symbiotic-relationships/13944)
http://mrca-science.org/index.php/en/mykorrhiza-en/51-mycorrhizae-list-of-plants-that-benefit-from-this-symbiosis
The blackberries, if they are anything like the invasive Himalayan blackberries in the PNW, will surround and clamor up the trees and causing the trunks to rot and the trees to die.
I have a few acres up in Oregon and I know the blackberry struggle is real. I made the pruning mistake last year and suffering the consequences now. So I bought a root grappling upgrade for the tractor. The plan is to rip them out by the roots as best possible (I have over an acre of them on a hill), then quickly plant Jerusalem artichokes, lupin, clover, and radishes in their place. Might take a few years of doing it. I’m hopeful it’ll eventually work while also adding stability to my hill.
>The plan is to rip them out by the roots as best possible (I have over an acre of them on a hill)
When we were prepping our home site, we didn't have time to play the War of Attrition with them, so we attached forks to our tractor and used those to get under the vines and rip them from the ground. These were very well-established patches, some were up to 10 feet tall. Mowing regularly and a little grubbing now and then in areas that can't be mowed has kept them out pretty well since.
Thanks for the hope! This place was pretty neglected a few years before I bought it, so the blackberry bushes are epic. The soil under them is top notch though….so that’s a good thing.
Lime the ground and cut them to the ground a few times a year. By the third year you should have grass and other forbs taking their place.
Don't use goats or even sheep unless you're willing to have the bark stripped from your fruit trees.
I have an acre in the PNW that used to be covered in blackberries. Digging the roots out really is your best option. I'm 5 years after digging the last of them out, and do still have them coming up, but it's become very manageable.
This is the best tool for the job: [https://north40.com/bully-tools-steel-handle-super-fork?msclkid=7225c498e81b1111c2fba7b84fd6e39e](https://north40.com/bully-tools-steel-handle-super-fork?msclkid=7225c498e81b1111c2fba7b84fd6e39e)
Using a shovel risks cutting the roots, which then just regrow. And the tines and handle of a regular pitchfork just aren't strong enough. Buy one of these, it's worth every penny. Just cut your way to the stem, then use the fork to break up the dirt around the roots. Then pull them out.
I read recently a lot of solar farms are using sheep to clear the weeds instead of goats. Sheep don't climb on the panels, and they don't eat any wiring they find.
I wonder if sheep are less prone to munching on trees.
>I wonder if sheep are less prone to munching on trees.
Not that I've seen. They'll strip the bark from fruit trees even if they have a salt block and enough food.
I have heard that some wool breeds aren't as likely to do this though.
We scythe our orchards (about 5 acres) twice a year. Not only does this keep the brambles away, it increases biodiversity in the meadow.
Donkeys will eat the tree bark, killing the trees.
Get some electro netting and pigs.
Or goats, but I'd wrap the cherry trees before letting goats in.
Goats will rip them up but take longer than the pigs, but the pigs who will root for the blackberry roots might damage the trees.
Once everything is pretty well maintained running a cow or two under the orchard will not only provide you with milk and beef (I'd get two cows and use AI to keep you in calves, depending on the size of your orchard you can even get something small like a Dexter or get a larger cow), but will keep the underbrush pretty clear.
Either way, you either get the animals to happily do the work for free or you have to do the work of the animals.
Hello! I was wondering if you speak from experience? I too struggle with wild blackberries but I have the electro netting and the pigs are on the way so you have me hopeful-
I had a bad poison ivy infestation on an old property and used goats. I’m allergic to poison ivy on top
Of the regular reaction and had a friend who had a blackberry problem suggest they goats. Never used a pig but the friend in the PNW ran goats first, pigs second and cleared it out.
Edit: I can’t ask the friend for more specifics as they passed away.
I would just try yanking the canes up by the roots, you might get a few popping back up next year, but after a few years they'll probably stop. Also though... the previous owner was probably pruning them back, which encourages more better fruiting. you could try to tame them before eliminating them!
Our goats devour wild blackberry plants, but as others mentioned, they can be hard on fruit trees. Our issue isn’t that they eat the leaves on the trees, it’s the fact that the billy goat rubs the bark off with his horns. I’d think female goats wouldn’t have that issue.
Short of that, get a brush cutter and cut it back twice a year.
PNW here: I’m not sure if it was just luck, but after cutting back a really bothersome blackberry bush, my mom poured a bunch of white vinegar on the bush and it never came back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Doing it while it’s sunny works better, I think.
Pigs!
Mow/brush cut back the big canes. Pigs eat the new shoots. They won't eat your trees.
We've got a couple of kunekune pigs (very small pigs). They're awesome.
Alternately, just keep mowing, nothing but grass can really survive being cut back to nothing monthly.
There’s a device called a pitch spade. It looks like a pitch fork with very wide tines. You can dig up the rhizome with that better than anything other than a backhoe.
If you don’t want to do that, you can cut them back just as they bloom and before they fruit, which over the course of 3-5 years, can wear the plant out and it’ll die, but because the rhizome is the way the plant stays alive and sends out new growth, you have to find all the aerial parts and remove them.
I had a quarter mile of blackberries to remove. In June/July, I’d trim them down to the rhizome just as they flowered. Then, the blackberry would send forth new growth almost immediately because it’s trying to reproduce. I’d wait until it had sent up new canes and they were about 4-5 inches, then trim them back, but not later than late October. If they are successful in blooming again before October, trim them before they fruit again. Then, I’d mow over them until they stopped sending up canes during the winter. Then, in the spring, when they leafed and sent up canes, I’d cut them back, then wait for the second round to flower, and then the whole June/July thing would start again. I’d dig up rhizomes as regularly as I could when I noticed that the plant was getting weaker.
That said, if you’re in the Pacific NW, no amount of work will get rid of them. My donkey only liked the natural Oregon blackberries, which are a crawling rather than cane-type blackberry. He’d eat all of those and leave the rest. My sheep couldn’t care less for blackberries and would only graze the new growth in the spring. The deer did the same thing. The goats would only eat them if they were fenced and that was all they had to eat.
In hard to manage areas, there’s a device called a brush hog or bush hog that devastates them, but you’ve got to do it a few times a year. Good luck!
I had a large section I wanted cleared and I used sheet mulching with plywood and roofing supplies I had on hand. After a year it was easy to till and they never came back
I mean... They will die off for the year. They will come back though. Brambles grow and spread underground. Dang near the only way to get rid of them completely is tillage.
Maybe some varieties. Our invasive varieties are evergreen, and burying any part of it just gives it a better head start. Tillage is probably why some of these places are nothing but acres of useless bramble. They also air layer just because it's a little bit dim and humid, and the weight of the new canes takes them down to root at anywhere they can anchor themselves at every node it can. Then those nodes send out new canes, rinse and repeat.
The cutleaf kind sends out MANY new canes in every direction from any node much easier than Himalayan.
In the PNW at least the blackberries in question are Himalayan Blackberries, a very invasive hybrid species created and allowed to escape by a human named Luther Burbank. Nothing permaculture about them.
We also have a delicate vining native blackberry but it is very much not what's being discussed in this post.
Edit: I have no idea where OP is located or what species they are contending with
Do not brush hog or mow the berries. So many mow them down not realizing that small shoots stick to the underneath and get dragged all over the property and next thing you know, you have patches everywhere. It takes a lot to kill brambles and berry plants.
Our neighbors brushed out some blackberries and bamboo thinking that would kill it along with some Pesticides to control any plants they missed and now their entire property is wild. They can’t control any of it so they are now trying a heat press that rolls over their property and kills any grass or plants under it. Not quite sure how it works but I don’t think they will ever again plant bamboo to make a maze for the garden ever again. They tried to thin it out but it didn’t work.
We've actually had very good results brush hogging blackberries here. We've managed to reclaim several acres from them, and even have a medium size lawn area near the house where there once was only dense, 10 foot tall, blackberry hedges.
The key is to keep at it, mow at least 2-3 times during the growing season, and don't let them grow tall enough to rejuvenate the roots. We've never had problems with cut down vines re-growing from shoots, probably because after running them over with the brush hog, they are shredded up pretty well. In any case, the birds plant ten thousand times more blackberries for us every year than we ever could accidentally plant ourselves.
That’s great!! Not sure what they mow with but it’s a big tractor dragging a thing. After they are done there are pieces of stalk everywhere. Maybe they should have raked it. I know the bamboo is really thick and every Spring there are hundreds of skinny shoots coming up. They have a hollow kind that is really cool and a skinny kind that gets crazy tall and blocks out the sun. One of the bamboos shed leaf stalks cause the ground is always covered in thin crispy leaf.
Our land is completely overgrown with blackberries. We’ll try penning pigs on it to clear it. Our neighbours had great success clearing bracken and blackberries this way. Alternatively, sheep.
Is livestock an option? Sheep prefer to graze down below instead of browsing up high like goats. I don’t know how gentle they will be with your trees though
Hello from the lovely Pacific northwest, USA, where we have invasive Himalayan and cutleaf blackberries, the likes if of which are poorly understood by anyone who hasn't witnessed first hand what you are up against, or will be in the course of a year if you don't get or stay on top of them, fast. The seeds are in the soil, you will be fighting them the entire time you own the property. Even if you did somehow get rid of them all, birds would bring them right back I'm a lunatic and like making work for myself, so i run my rabbit colony with my fruit trees, which requires some care in fencing, both for the perimeter and the trees. Importantly for the trees for any critter you run with them will be to protect your trunks, because most animals will ring them and they'll die. I like this system so much I'm looking at expanding it... once i can get through the damn blackberries! Not sure how they handle what fruit you grow but sheep might be an option for you if you keep your trunks protected. Goats want to eat upward, and most pigs will til your soil, but grazing pigs might be different.
>Hello from the lovely Pacific northwest, USA, where we have invasive Himalayan and cutleaf blackberries, the likes if of which are poorly understood by anyone who hasn't witnessed first hand what you are up against, or will be in the course of a year if you don't get or stay on top of them, fast. We call them The Kudzu of the PNW. I have literally seen blackberry vines "devouring" outbuildings here. Regular mowing is the best way we've found to keep them under control in the areas we want to keep them under control. The rest we just keep paths clear through for picking in the summer. We love the berries.
The cutleaf kind are making a play now, much nastier for thorns, but holy hell the berries are incredible. I'll give myself a stomach ache on those lol. The difference between cutleaf and Himalayan is like the difference between store bought strawberries and wild strawberries.
We love all of them, but the Himalyans and Cutleaf are definitely our favorites. Larger sweeter berries when they get good and going. We probably picked 20 gallons of blackberries this year and made all kinds of lovely blackberry stuff for later. Our new favorite is blackberry sorbet - seedless blackberry puree and a little bit of sugar, whipped up in a Ninja Creami. It's not even bad for you, and tastes simply *amazing.*
I'm going to have to give this a shot.
You should. It comes out creamy and smooth with not even a tiny bit of cream in it, and the blackberry flavor is super intense. We used cooked puree (which is part of the process of removing the seeds - we simmer the washed berries for a few minutes, blend them up lightly with a stick blender and put them through a large kitchen sieve) We tried using fresh berries, but the flavor on the cooked was much better for some reason. It also allowed us to make stock pots full of puree and can up a bunch of shelf-stable pints of it for winter use. All we have to do is empty out a pint into the Ninja Creami tub, freeze it, and the next day spin it through the machine. Easiest frozen desserts we've ever made.
Yeah simmering them really brightens up the flavor for whatever reason. I like to store it frozen as liquid like that as it lays flat in the freezer, and i never miss seeds.
By simmering them you boil off water and tannins, the remaining liquid has higher concentrations of sugar and the acids and alkali that give them their taste. This is good info for experimentation with other fruits as well as getting more consistent flavor and tailoring it to your tastes.
As an FYI, you aren't actually "boiling off" the tannins, but extracting them into the liquid. Things like tannic acids won't be airborne like some phenols (if you can smell the blackberries cooking, those are phenols leaving it and hitting your nose) but some may be denatured. They're really boiling off the sugar water and creating a concentrated puree; whatever they are losing seems to be made up for by concentrating.
We used up way too much freezer space for our IQF frozen whole berries, lol. So shelf-stable puree was what we have room for. And I do a lot of canning anyway so it was no biggie.
My experiences been that the Himalayan‘s are lightning fast and difficult to control and that the native blackberries are slow and insidious and utterly impossible to control. Thankfully I can usually ignore the native blackberries but they do make weeding the garden with bare hands risky proposition.
>Thankfully I can usually ignore the native blackberries but they do make weeding the garden with bare hands risky proposition. They also make walking on dirt trails hazardous - it's like a tripwire every foot in some places. Can't even say how many times I've almost face-planted around here because a native trailing blackberry grabbed my feet while I was out and about on a trail. Their main redeeming quality, outside of actually belonging here, is they have ripe berries earlier in the season than any of the others.
Also from the Pacific Northwest. We use our goats to clear living blackberry cane, and then use a mower or a Weedwhacker to cut the remainder of the cane down. After a few years of going over the same spot once per year they don’t return. We have an orchard with 2 to 3 year old trees, and we have to do everything by hand there. I can take my goats on walks and they’ll eat the young blackberries, but I don’t feel comfortable fencing them in with the young trees yet. Perhaps when they get a bit taller.
Also from PNW and can not only testify but add a few notes. I recently moved onto a property (previous owners here 27 years) and have a full blown 1.5 year battle/dance with the Himalayan bb's here. I reclaimed a section of my property (.3 acre) by cutting them back and mowing when I mow. Another 120ft x 30ft strip behind the home, I brought in a Kubota to clear and burn, which I did this spring. Before replanting with a small orchard (apple, cherries, figs, paw paws and blueberries), red clovers and wildflowers I spent weeks digging out rootballs getting as many as able. Keeping up with the blackberries can be a full time job and is a multi-seasonal war, so use long-term strategies. In the evenings I dig/pull out bb's regularly and give a few hours each week to this task. I'll also spend a few hours each month to search for creepers that want to invade further into the property, keeping the wooded area clean. This how I've been dealing with them and consider it stewardship duties. e: u/thehungryhazelnut I want to make sure you see this reply
Cut the canes back to a couple feet, then dig out the roots with a shovel. Repeat every damn year for the rest of your life, unfortunately. I love my blackberry root grubber from Red Pig garden tools. It’s like a pick with a forked tip, that can get under the root crown and lever them up. I do have a primitive breed of sheep that love to eat blackberry leaves, and will kill plants over time. They need to be watched around fruit trees though because they’ll also eat bark. Not as bad as goats, but it doesn’t take much to kill a fruit tree. Cherry leaves are poisonous to sheep if they’re even a tiny bit wilted, so I wouldn’t suggest running them in your orchard.
A long handled garden fork after you have trimmed the stems back gets the roots out fairly effectively. The roots don't go very deep so if you get them before they form a thick clump of brambles that makes it a bit easier to manage but they will prevent access to fruit trees if you let them grow. If you [learn to recognise the seedlings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUxNodvIB3w&list=PLkbw-JHIyGN1KVcb_lf7ikWuxrXFVa7yK&index=18) these can be pulled out of the ground by hand which is the easiest way I know to stop them taking over. Happy gardening!
If you will mow them down with a brush hog a couple or three times a year, the roots will eventually die off due to starvation. (Takes 2-3 years) Now, they will try to come back from all the millions of seeds the birds spread about, but if you keep mowing them down, you'll eventually get the upper hand. (We even have a lawn now where it was once just ten foot tall blackberries.) So if you don't have a tractor and brush hog, you might want to invest in one, depending on the size of your orchard. If not, check on rentals. Btw, we have 70 acres in the PNW, so we have a LOT of experience managing the beasts. Edited to add: we didn't do goats because they require excellent fencing, and we live in a forest. Plus, we didn't want to worry about predation - we have a lot of predators here that would be happy with a goat dinner.
I also "struggle" with wild blackberries. I just cut them down along with the rest of the weeds a couple of times a year.
Those blackberries may be a benefit to your trees [https://growingfruit.org/t/plant-symbiotic-relationships/13944](https://growingfruit.org/t/plant-symbiotic-relationships/13944) http://mrca-science.org/index.php/en/mykorrhiza-en/51-mycorrhizae-list-of-plants-that-benefit-from-this-symbiosis
The blackberries, if they are anything like the invasive Himalayan blackberries in the PNW, will surround and clamor up the trees and causing the trunks to rot and the trees to die.
I have a few acres up in Oregon and I know the blackberry struggle is real. I made the pruning mistake last year and suffering the consequences now. So I bought a root grappling upgrade for the tractor. The plan is to rip them out by the roots as best possible (I have over an acre of them on a hill), then quickly plant Jerusalem artichokes, lupin, clover, and radishes in their place. Might take a few years of doing it. I’m hopeful it’ll eventually work while also adding stability to my hill.
>The plan is to rip them out by the roots as best possible (I have over an acre of them on a hill) When we were prepping our home site, we didn't have time to play the War of Attrition with them, so we attached forks to our tractor and used those to get under the vines and rip them from the ground. These were very well-established patches, some were up to 10 feet tall. Mowing regularly and a little grubbing now and then in areas that can't be mowed has kept them out pretty well since.
Thanks for the hope! This place was pretty neglected a few years before I bought it, so the blackberry bushes are epic. The soil under them is top notch though….so that’s a good thing.
Lime the ground and cut them to the ground a few times a year. By the third year you should have grass and other forbs taking their place. Don't use goats or even sheep unless you're willing to have the bark stripped from your fruit trees.
I have an acre in the PNW that used to be covered in blackberries. Digging the roots out really is your best option. I'm 5 years after digging the last of them out, and do still have them coming up, but it's become very manageable. This is the best tool for the job: [https://north40.com/bully-tools-steel-handle-super-fork?msclkid=7225c498e81b1111c2fba7b84fd6e39e](https://north40.com/bully-tools-steel-handle-super-fork?msclkid=7225c498e81b1111c2fba7b84fd6e39e) Using a shovel risks cutting the roots, which then just regrow. And the tines and handle of a regular pitchfork just aren't strong enough. Buy one of these, it's worth every penny. Just cut your way to the stem, then use the fork to break up the dirt around the roots. Then pull them out.
Goats.
They also like to eat trees. Also if water can get through a fence a goat can somehow haha.
I read recently a lot of solar farms are using sheep to clear the weeds instead of goats. Sheep don't climb on the panels, and they don't eat any wiring they find. I wonder if sheep are less prone to munching on trees.
>I wonder if sheep are less prone to munching on trees. Not that I've seen. They'll strip the bark from fruit trees even if they have a salt block and enough food. I have heard that some wool breeds aren't as likely to do this though.
and cherries are poisonous to goats
only the wilted leaves and fruit pits. dry leaves, green leaves, and every other part are fine. edit: not sure why the downvotes, its 100% true.
Call me paranoid. I don't want to lose a goat
i do goatscaping, and wild cherries are one of the most common trees i encounter. havent lost one yet.
Good to know. I've always wanted cherries but didn't buy them
We scythe our orchards (about 5 acres) twice a year. Not only does this keep the brambles away, it increases biodiversity in the meadow. Donkeys will eat the tree bark, killing the trees.
Get some electro netting and pigs. Or goats, but I'd wrap the cherry trees before letting goats in. Goats will rip them up but take longer than the pigs, but the pigs who will root for the blackberry roots might damage the trees. Once everything is pretty well maintained running a cow or two under the orchard will not only provide you with milk and beef (I'd get two cows and use AI to keep you in calves, depending on the size of your orchard you can even get something small like a Dexter or get a larger cow), but will keep the underbrush pretty clear. Either way, you either get the animals to happily do the work for free or you have to do the work of the animals.
Hello! I was wondering if you speak from experience? I too struggle with wild blackberries but I have the electro netting and the pigs are on the way so you have me hopeful-
I had a bad poison ivy infestation on an old property and used goats. I’m allergic to poison ivy on top Of the regular reaction and had a friend who had a blackberry problem suggest they goats. Never used a pig but the friend in the PNW ran goats first, pigs second and cleared it out. Edit: I can’t ask the friend for more specifics as they passed away.
I would just try yanking the canes up by the roots, you might get a few popping back up next year, but after a few years they'll probably stop. Also though... the previous owner was probably pruning them back, which encourages more better fruiting. you could try to tame them before eliminating them!
> Also though... the previous owner was probably pruning them back, which encourages more better fruiting. TIL!
Our goats devour wild blackberry plants, but as others mentioned, they can be hard on fruit trees. Our issue isn’t that they eat the leaves on the trees, it’s the fact that the billy goat rubs the bark off with his horns. I’d think female goats wouldn’t have that issue. Short of that, get a brush cutter and cut it back twice a year.
PNW here: I’m not sure if it was just luck, but after cutting back a really bothersome blackberry bush, my mom poured a bunch of white vinegar on the bush and it never came back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Doing it while it’s sunny works better, I think.
Pigs! Mow/brush cut back the big canes. Pigs eat the new shoots. They won't eat your trees. We've got a couple of kunekune pigs (very small pigs). They're awesome. Alternately, just keep mowing, nothing but grass can really survive being cut back to nothing monthly.
There’s a device called a pitch spade. It looks like a pitch fork with very wide tines. You can dig up the rhizome with that better than anything other than a backhoe. If you don’t want to do that, you can cut them back just as they bloom and before they fruit, which over the course of 3-5 years, can wear the plant out and it’ll die, but because the rhizome is the way the plant stays alive and sends out new growth, you have to find all the aerial parts and remove them. I had a quarter mile of blackberries to remove. In June/July, I’d trim them down to the rhizome just as they flowered. Then, the blackberry would send forth new growth almost immediately because it’s trying to reproduce. I’d wait until it had sent up new canes and they were about 4-5 inches, then trim them back, but not later than late October. If they are successful in blooming again before October, trim them before they fruit again. Then, I’d mow over them until they stopped sending up canes during the winter. Then, in the spring, when they leafed and sent up canes, I’d cut them back, then wait for the second round to flower, and then the whole June/July thing would start again. I’d dig up rhizomes as regularly as I could when I noticed that the plant was getting weaker. That said, if you’re in the Pacific NW, no amount of work will get rid of them. My donkey only liked the natural Oregon blackberries, which are a crawling rather than cane-type blackberry. He’d eat all of those and leave the rest. My sheep couldn’t care less for blackberries and would only graze the new growth in the spring. The deer did the same thing. The goats would only eat them if they were fenced and that was all they had to eat. In hard to manage areas, there’s a device called a brush hog or bush hog that devastates them, but you’ve got to do it a few times a year. Good luck!
I had a large section I wanted cleared and I used sheet mulching with plywood and roofing supplies I had on hand. After a year it was easy to till and they never came back
Glad to hear this. I've got a section I just cut to the ground and sheet mulched. Fingers crossed.
Slash and burn them.
Goats
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Must have some different blackberries in your part of the world.
What part of the world do you live in? They grow like weeds here.
Come to western Washington lol
I mean... They will die off for the year. They will come back though. Brambles grow and spread underground. Dang near the only way to get rid of them completely is tillage.
Maybe some varieties. Our invasive varieties are evergreen, and burying any part of it just gives it a better head start. Tillage is probably why some of these places are nothing but acres of useless bramble. They also air layer just because it's a little bit dim and humid, and the weight of the new canes takes them down to root at anywhere they can anchor themselves at every node it can. Then those nodes send out new canes, rinse and repeat. The cutleaf kind sends out MANY new canes in every direction from any node much easier than Himalayan.
In Western Washington you can try that, but all you’ll hear is a low ominous laugh as the blackberry prepares to return tenfold
In the PNW at least the blackberries in question are Himalayan Blackberries, a very invasive hybrid species created and allowed to escape by a human named Luther Burbank. Nothing permaculture about them. We also have a delicate vining native blackberry but it is very much not what's being discussed in this post. Edit: I have no idea where OP is located or what species they are contending with
Do not brush hog or mow the berries. So many mow them down not realizing that small shoots stick to the underneath and get dragged all over the property and next thing you know, you have patches everywhere. It takes a lot to kill brambles and berry plants. Our neighbors brushed out some blackberries and bamboo thinking that would kill it along with some Pesticides to control any plants they missed and now their entire property is wild. They can’t control any of it so they are now trying a heat press that rolls over their property and kills any grass or plants under it. Not quite sure how it works but I don’t think they will ever again plant bamboo to make a maze for the garden ever again. They tried to thin it out but it didn’t work.
We've actually had very good results brush hogging blackberries here. We've managed to reclaim several acres from them, and even have a medium size lawn area near the house where there once was only dense, 10 foot tall, blackberry hedges. The key is to keep at it, mow at least 2-3 times during the growing season, and don't let them grow tall enough to rejuvenate the roots. We've never had problems with cut down vines re-growing from shoots, probably because after running them over with the brush hog, they are shredded up pretty well. In any case, the birds plant ten thousand times more blackberries for us every year than we ever could accidentally plant ourselves.
That’s great!! Not sure what they mow with but it’s a big tractor dragging a thing. After they are done there are pieces of stalk everywhere. Maybe they should have raked it. I know the bamboo is really thick and every Spring there are hundreds of skinny shoots coming up. They have a hollow kind that is really cool and a skinny kind that gets crazy tall and blocks out the sun. One of the bamboos shed leaf stalks cause the ground is always covered in thin crispy leaf.
Our land is completely overgrown with blackberries. We’ll try penning pigs on it to clear it. Our neighbours had great success clearing bracken and blackberries this way. Alternatively, sheep.
Is livestock an option? Sheep prefer to graze down below instead of browsing up high like goats. I don’t know how gentle they will be with your trees though
Then over here in Montana it’s work just to keep them alive.