Invitation to Blackberry Mountain.
Last July, I was finishing another landscaping estimate and getting ready to head home when my phone rang.
It was a woman named Samantha.
“Hey Samantha, how’s it going? What can I do for you?”
She told me she had a large blackberry project and wanted to know if I could come take a look.
There was one unusual detail.
It wasn’t her property.
She was the caretaker for an older gentleman and had been helping manage his household and affairs for several years. She coordinated contractors, handled bills, and took care of things around the property that he could no longer easily manage himself.
She asked if I could meet her there in about half an hour.
Sure.
Send me the address.
Then I Saw the Blackberry
I arrived at a large residential property in Kent.
Compared with many of the tighter properties we work on around Seattle, this was a sizable piece of land.
Samantha walked me toward the back.
And there it was.
Blackberry Mountain.
I’ve seen Himalayan blackberry all over the Seattle area.
We remove it regularly.
I’ve seen it along fences, on hillsides, behind garages, through greenbelts, covering neglected garden beds, and taking over entire sections of yards.
But at the time, I had never seen anything quite like this on a residential property.
It was enormous.
The blackberry was incredibly dense and, in places, appeared to reach roughly 15 feet high.
You couldn’t see through it.
You couldn’t really see what was underneath it.
It wasn’t a few blackberry canes that needed to be cut down.
It was a wall.
I remember standing there looking at it with a mixture of shock and excitement.
This was going to be a project.
How Do You Estimate Something You Can’t See Through?
Samantha asked what I thought.
I told her I needed to measure it first.
On ordinary projects, we can walk the service area, take measurements, look at access, estimate vegetation density, determine how much material needs to be removed, and build the quote from there.
This one was more difficult.
The blackberry was so dense that parts of the ground underneath it weren’t visible.
So I used a combination of field measurements and mapping tools to estimate the size of the service area.
Then came the harder part:
How much labor would it take?
How much waste would this produce?
How many truckloads?
How many workers?
How much root work?
What was hidden underneath everything?
With severely overgrown landscapes, there’s always some uncertainty because you can’t completely evaluate what you can’t see.
You make the best estimate you can based on the dimensions, height, density, access, expected waste volume, equipment requirements, and experience from previous projects.
We eventually landed around $5,000 plus tax for the project as originally scoped.
That’s a lot of money for landscaping.
It was also a lot of landscaping.
This wasn’t going to be one person with a pair of loppers spending Saturday afternoon in the backyard.
It would require a crew, commercial equipment, multiple days of work, hauling, disposal, root work, and a large amount of material afterward.
After some discussion about the scope and price, we had a project.
Day One: Attack the Mountain
The following week, we showed up with the crew.
Everyone walked into the backyard and looked at the blackberry.
I had already seen it.
Most of them hadn’t.
There was definitely a moment of:
Okay. This is a big one.
Then we got to work.
Brush cutters came out.
Trimmers came out.
Loppers came out.
We started cutting the blackberry into manageable sections and working our way through the mass.
This is where having an experienced crew makes such a difference.
One person cutting isn’t enough.
As vegetation comes down, someone has to move it.
Someone has to organize it.
Someone has to haul it.
Someone has to load it.
Then the cutters need room to continue advancing.
It’s a continuous cycle:
Cut. Move. Load. Haul. Repeat.
After several hours, we had made serious progress.
After another few hours, the blackberry wall that had dominated the backyard was disappearing.
But as happens on large restoration projects, removing the visible vegetation revealed everything that had been hiding underneath it.
You Never Know What’s Under 15 Feet of Blackberry
We found a hidden tree.
We found miscellaneous debris.
And we encountered a bee nest that required us to change how we worked around that portion of the property.
That’s another thing homeowners don’t necessarily see when looking at a finished estimate.
On a severely overgrown property, the vegetation can conceal the actual working conditions.
You don’t know exactly what’s underneath until you get there.
There can be:
- Rocks
- Logs
- Stumps
- Fences
- Wire
- Garbage
- Holes
- Irrigation
- Old landscaping
- Trees
- Uneven ground
- Insects and nests
You uncover the property as you work.
That’s part of restoration.
By the end of the first day, everyone was tired.
It was July, we’d been cutting and hauling blackberry for hours, and we’d already moved a tremendous amount of material.
We called it a little early that afternoon.
There was still plenty left to do.
Cutting the Blackberry Was Only Phase One
By roughly the next day, we had completed the majority of the heavy cutting and clearing.
But removing blackberry canes isn’t necessarily the same thing as addressing the plant.
Now we could finally see the ground.
That’s when the detailed work began.
We went after accessible blackberry crowns and roots throughout the service area.
When I say accessible, I mean what our crew could reasonably identify and excavate within the agreed work area without pretending that every underground root fragment could somehow be found.
We used the tools you’d expect:
Pickaxes.
Grub hoes.
Shovels.
Loppers.
Hand tools.
And a lot of physical labor.
Blackberry crowns can be stubborn.
Some come out relatively easily.
Others are intertwined with rocks, tree roots, old debris, and compacted soil.
And on an area this large, there can be a lot of them.
Blackberry Removal Isn’t a Guarantee of No Regrowth
This is important.
You can remove the visible blackberry canes.
You can excavate accessible crowns and roots.
You can clean the area thoroughly.
But that doesn’t mean nobody will ever see another blackberry shoot.
A large, established infestation has had years to reproduce and spread.
There can be remaining root material.
There can be seeds in the soil.
Wildlife can spread seeds.
Blackberry can also return from neighboring areas.
That’s why we view a major blackberry cleanup as a reset, followed by monitoring and maintenance.
The objective is to take an area that has become completely overwhelmed and bring it back under control.
Then future shoots are substantially easier to deal with than a 15-foot wall of mature blackberry.
Then Came the Material
Once the clearing and detailed cleanup were completed, we moved into the finishing stage.
This was a very large area, so we needed a lot of material.
For much of the space, arborist chips made economic sense because we were covering such a large amount of ground.
We also used landscape bark in portions of the project.
The material order was substantial.
A delivery arrived and suddenly we had another mountain in front of us—except this time it was mulch.
Now it had to be moved.
Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow.
Load after load.
The crew spent much of the day transporting and spreading material across the newly cleared area.
We installed a substantial mulch layer appropriate to the project, with the goal of covering exposed soil, creating a cleaner finished surface, and helping reduce future weed pressure.
Mulch can help considerably after a cleanup, but it isn’t a permanent barrier against blackberry or every other weed.
The area would still need to be monitored.
Any blackberry shoots that returned would be much easier to identify and address while small.
Landscaping Is a Team Sport
This project is one of the jobs that really demonstrated to me what a crew can accomplish together.
There were a lot of labor hours involved over several days.
There were truckloads of debris.
There was cutting.
Digging.
Raking.
Loading.
Hauling.
Mulch installation.
And plenty of walking back and forth with wheelbarrows.
It was the middle of July, so keeping everyone fed and hydrated mattered too.
I bought the crew lunch.
We had drinks and plenty of lemonade.
People were tired, but everyone could see the property changing in front of us.
That’s one of the things I love about large cleanup projects.
The progress is physical.
You can see exactly what your labor accomplished.
Then We Looked Back at the Yard
Eventually, Blackberry Mountain was gone.
We had a little time left, so we also cleaned up some ivy along another portion of the property to give the project a more complete appearance.
Then we stood back and looked at it.
This wasn’t some luxury landscape with an outdoor kitchen, porcelain pavers, elaborate lighting, and a perfectly designed garden.
It was a normal residential property.
A home where people had lived their lives and made memories.
Over time, one portion of the landscape had simply gotten away from them.
And now it was manageable again.
That’s what I liked about this project.
It wasn’t about creating something extravagant.
It was about giving someone their property back.
What Homeowners Can Learn From Blackberry Mountain
If you have a blackberry infestation that looks completely overwhelming, don’t automatically assume nothing can be done.
Large blackberry projects are possible.
But you need to understand what you’re asking for.
Are you only cutting the canes?
Are accessible crowns and roots being excavated?
Is the debris being hauled away?
What’s going to cover the exposed ground afterward?
What vegetation do you want to preserve?
What’s the plan when new shoots appear?
And what does the finished area eventually need to become?
Those questions matter.
A contractor should also have the crew, tools, hauling capacity, and experience appropriate for the scale of the project.
Most importantly, understand that restoration and permanent eradication aren’t the same thing.
A neglected area can be reset.
It can be dramatically improved.
It can be brought back under control.
But landscapes continue growing.
The long-term success of a blackberry cleanup depends partly on what happens after the big cleanup is finished.
On to the Next One
At the time, this was the largest residential blackberry project I had personally encountered.
It became one of those jobs you remember.
The initial phone call.
Walking into the backyard.
Seeing that enormous wall for the first time.
Watching the crew disappear into it with brush cutters.
Finding everything underneath.
Truckloads going out.
Mulch coming in.
And finally standing in a completely different-looking yard a few days later.
Then we loaded the tools, cleaned the trucks, and moved on to the next project.
Because around Seattle, blackberry doesn’t stay gone from our schedule for very long.
We see it almost every week.
And somewhere out there, there’s probably another Blackberry Mountain waiting for us.
