You Can Absolutely Do It Yourself. Here’s What “Free” Actually Costs.
Want to know the secret to removing blackberry for free?
Do it yourself.
Seriously.
You don’t necessarily need to spend $2,000 or $3,000 hiring a landscaping company to remove blackberry from your property.
Blackberry isn’t some mysterious plant that only professional landscapers know how to cut.
You can learn how to do it.
You can buy the tools.
You can watch videos.
You can read articles like this one.
You have access to more information today than homeowners at almost any other point in history.
So yes:
You can remove blackberry yourself.
But there’s a catch.
Nothing is actually free.
If you’re not paying someone else with money, you’re usually paying with something else:
Your tools. Your physical labor. Your waste-hauling capacity. And most importantly, your time.
So let’s remove some blackberry.
First: How Much Blackberry Do You Actually Have?
Before buying anything, walk outside and look at the problem.
There’s a huge difference between three blackberry shoots growing through a garden bed and 2,000 square feet of established blackberry that’s been growing for years.
Think about:
- How many square feet are covered?
- How tall is it?
- How dense is it?
- Can you see the ground?
- Is the property flat or sloped?
- Can you easily reach the area?
- Where will the debris go?
- How much time do you realistically have?
A few shoots?
That’s an easy Saturday task.
A 10-by-5-foot blackberry patch?
Still very reasonable for a lot of homeowners.
A thousand square feet?
Now you have a project.
Two or three thousand square feet of mature blackberry?
You may have just given yourself a temporary career in landscaping.
Scale changes everything.
Step 1: Gather Your Tools
You don’t need every tool a professional landscaping company owns.
For a smaller DIY blackberry project, some basic equipment can take you pretty far.
Depending on the size and conditions, useful tools can include:
- Thick work gloves
- Eye protection
- Long sleeves and durable clothing
- Loppers
- Hand pruners
- A sturdy metal rake
- Shovel
- Grub hoe or mattock
- Tarp or other debris container
- Wheelbarrow
For larger areas, powered cutting equipment may speed up the initial clearing considerably, but use equipment appropriate for your experience and follow its safety instructions.
The important thing is having tools for two different jobs:
Cutting the canes above ground.
And:
Working on the crowns and accessible roots below ground.
Those are different phases.
Step 2: Cut the Canes
Now get started.
For a small patch, loppers may be all you need.
Cut.
Move the cane.
Cut.
Move the cane.
Keep working your way through the patch.
For dense growth, don’t randomly attack the entire area at once.
Pick a starting point and create some working room.
Then advance through the blackberry systematically.
Cut. Stage. Haul. Repeat.
As you get closer to the ground, you’ll begin seeing where the canes originate.
Cut them low enough that you can expose and identify the crowns you’ll address during the next phase.
And keep moving.
Maybe you finish in two hours.
Maybe you spend the entire Saturday doing it.
Maybe Sunday comes around and you realize you’ve only completed a quarter of the property.
That’s okay.
You aren’t paying a professional crew.
Your project moves at your speed.
Step 3: Deal With the Waste
This is where homeowners often discover the hidden problem with blackberry removal.
You cut everything down.
Great.
Now what?
You may have an enormous pile of thorny blackberry canes sitting in your yard.
Removing vegetation creates waste.
And blackberry can produce a surprising amount of it.
For smaller amounts, your local yard-waste service may provide an option, depending on what it accepts and its collection rules.
For larger projects, you may need another disposal solution.
Either way, plan for this before you start cutting.
Otherwise you can successfully remove your blackberry problem and replace it with a blackberry-pile problem.
Step 4: Find the Crowns
If your goal is simply to knock the blackberry down temporarily, you could stop after cutting.
But expect it to grow again.
If you’re trying to achieve more substantial control, the next step is addressing accessible crowns and roots.
Once the canes are out of the way, the ground becomes much easier to inspect.
This is where a grub hoe, mattock, shovel, or similar digging tool becomes useful.
Work methodically.
Start on one side of the area and move across it.
Locate the larger crowns where the canes originated.
Loosen the surrounding soil.
Work underneath them.
Remove what you can reasonably access.
Then move forward.
Dig. Remove. Collect. Repeat.
This is not particularly complicated.
It is repetitive.
And after doing it for several hours, you’ll understand why professional crews develop specific techniques for this kind of work.
Step 5: Rake and Clean
Once the major vegetation and accessible crowns have been addressed, clean the area.
Rake.
Collect loose vegetation.
Remove remaining pieces of cane.
Look for crowns you missed.
Stage the remaining waste.
Then rake again.
Eventually, something interesting happens.
You can see the ground.
What was previously a wall of blackberry is now usable space again.
That’s the rewarding part.
You’re Not Necessarily Finished
There’s an important distinction between clearing blackberry and guaranteeing that blackberry will never return.
Don’t expect the second one from a weekend cleanup.
Established blackberry can return from material that remains, and new plants can establish from seed or surrounding areas.
Monitor the area.
When you see new shoots, deal with them while they’re small.
A tiny blackberry shoot is substantially easier to manage than the blackberry wall you just spent two weekends removing.
That’s why the first major cleanup is a reset.
Maintenance keeps the reset from turning back into another restoration project.
So How Much Did Your “Free” Blackberry Removal Cost?
Now let’s do the accounting.
You didn’t receive a landscaping invoice.
So that’s good.
But maybe you bought:
Gloves.
Loppers.
A grub hoe.
A rake.
A wheelbarrow.
Maybe additional cutting equipment.
Maybe you paid for disposal.
And then there’s the big expense:
your time.
Maybe the project took one afternoon.
That’s an excellent DIY project.
Maybe it took two weekends.
Maybe it took four.
Maybe you postponed other plans.
Maybe your back and shoulders are reminding you about the project Monday morning.
You saved the contractor’s labor because you became the labor.
That’s the secret.
To Save the Landscaper’s Money, Become the Landscaper
This applies to almost every service business.
You can change your own oil.
You can clean your own house.
You can paint your own bedroom.
You can pressure-wash your driveway.
You can learn basic home repairs.
And you can remove your own blackberry.
Doing something yourself can save a substantial amount of money.
But what you’re really doing is replacing the professional’s:
labor + tools + equipment + experience + hauling + time
with your own.
Sometimes that’s a fantastic trade.
Sometimes it isn’t.
When DIY Makes Sense
If you have a manageable blackberry patch, you’re physically comfortable doing the work, you have free time, and you have a reasonable way to handle the waste, I’d seriously consider doing it yourself.
You’ll learn something.
You’ll acquire tools you can use for future maintenance.
And after tackling a substantial blackberry patch, ordinary garden-bed maintenance is going to feel pretty easy.
There’s also genuine satisfaction in looking at something that was completely overgrown and knowing:
I cleared that myself.
When Hiring a Crew Starts Making More Sense
Now imagine 1,000 or 2,000 square feet of dense blackberry.
Add a slope.
Add difficult access.
Add several years of growth.
Add trees and shrubs mixed into it.
Add truckloads of debris.
Add limited free time.
The DIY calculation starts changing.
Professional landscapers already have the tools.
They already have the trucks.
They already have waste-hauling systems.
Most importantly, they have multiple people who do this work repeatedly.
What might consume several of your weekends may be something an appropriately equipped crew can tackle much more quickly.
That’s what the invoice is buying.
There Is No Wrong Answer
I’m a landscaping contractor, and I’ll tell homeowners this directly:
You do not need to hire us for everything.
Some landscaping projects are excellent DIY projects.
If you have the time and want to do the work, go for it.
If you’d rather spend your weekend with your kids, working on another project, going somewhere, relaxing, or doing literally anything except fighting blackberry, hire somebody.
Neither decision is wrong.
It’s an economic calculation.
You either spend some combination of:
Money.
Time.
Labor.
Equipment.
Relationships.
Or convenience.
Everybody values those things differently.
So yes, you can remove blackberry for free.
You just have to decide whether your time is free too.
And if you spend the next three weekends cutting canes, digging crowns, raking debris, and hauling blackberry?
Congratulations.
You didn’t get free landscaping.
You became the landscaper.
