Winning the war against blackberry brambles

We've been battling blackberries and nettles for the past 2 years on our hang and this Spring we finally got to ground in the last corner. Feb 2011

Hidden stump.

You cannot walk here.

April 2011. Almost done with the first pass as things start to spring back to life.

First photo of the first pass - this is the final corner, the area in all the previous photos in this post. I'm standing up above the hang in the horse's area. See the maple tree near the middle? It had blackberries going all the way up to the top of its branches. Now we can walkup to it and touch it: ) I love this tree that we've freed.


It was a triumphant moment, removing the last bramble and bagging it and dragging the bag down to the brush piles the blackberries have helped me create as a barrier between the creek and our pasture.

What is amazing to me is when we first bought this house, end of 2008, I wanted to build this Tpost fence but I could not walk down here. So I cut myself a path along the fenceline right through the blackberry forest. It was about one meter wide just so I could put this fence in. (I would love to rip out the old chainlink whose posts have rotted away completely but the neighbors have a dog and it is the only thing keeping him out. So the old crappy chainlink stays, *sigh*.) Anyway, it's no longer just a narrow path, it's free! These scraggly bare bushes are Elderberry - sort of weeds in themselves.


This summer we saw grass grow for the first time in ?? because light was finally able to touch ground.

That means we had to get the grass mowed ourselves for the first time, and since it's so uneven it had to be a weed whacker.

Can you find the maple now? It's August 2011. My man is weedwhacking. There are still bare spots where the grass has not grown back..

but mostly it's a lawn now interrupted by stumps (Mercer lookout perches) and adolescent birch trees.

We had not been able to walk over most of the hang for the majority of the time we've lived here - no creature outside of clever rabbits and mice can move about in thick blackberries mixed with stinging nettles.

Look how inviting! I still can't believe it. The little trees are probably too dense, but I cannot express what a pleasure it is to only have to deal with grass and trees and not painful nettles and brambles.



Although this area is too full of stumps to be useful for much, I eventually want my horse down there trimming the grass. The baby trees planted years ago are finally free of brambles holding them down (they are often curved showing the restraint, and a couple are bent so badly from being held down they are growing horizontally at about 2 meters high and need removal), but although the baby trees have tripled in size since we moved in, they are still too young to withstand Baasha rubbing on them so unfortunately the hang is still a no-horse zone.

I included this photo to show you the layout of the paddock+hang. The horse area is artificially filled to form a semi-flat area up top, it drops off steeply before the natural hang begins. The next door neighbors have a much bigger filled area to make a big backyard, but then their cliff is much larger and steeper and nothing below is useable until you get to the ponds. There is a funny little naturally sloped area between the two filled yards where our fenceline and their path to their ponds cuts through. I love the curviness of this land, but it is not convenient for working on!

We were shocked to look at the 2008 vs. 2011 photos and realize how big our baby trees have become. I cannot wait until our hang is a true woods again, as it once was.

Yesterday.

What a wonderful feeling to have "lawn" where once hip-high blackberries flourished.


As PNW people know, a 1st pass is never the end with blackberries.

You can see in this photo a little baby blackberry that sprouted from the remaining roots (we couldn't dig out everything). (The blackberry start is by Mercer's left ear.)



But we won. These little starts are tasting their first Dicamba and I'm walking the whole hang regularly, stunting if not killing whatever comes back.

Here's that same maple, yesterday.

Every time my man and I go down there we marvel at our accomplishment, we cannot believe that we did it, and the feeling of walking or just standing where we couldn't for so long is amazing.

Oh yah, and the fish caretakers nextdoor told us to give it up, "You'll never win that battle". Now they walk along our hang every day on the way to their ponds and see that it is possible.