Blackberry Removal in Shoreline: A 1,400-Square-Foot Overgrowth Project
Here’s a blackberry project we did for a customer named Michael.
He has a rental property in Shoreline with roughly 1,400 square feet of blackberry growth, and some of it had reached close to 18 feet tall. It wasn’t just blackberry either. It was mixed in with trees, shrubs, vines, and other growth, so the whole area had basically turned into one large mass of vegetation.
It was massive.
For a project like this, you are not talking about a quick trim-and-haul job. There is a lot of cutting, pruning, pulling, raking, dragging, loading, and waste removal involved.
We sent a larger crew and budgeted roughly 94 labor hours to complete the work.
That sounds like a lot, but once you see the amount of material involved, it makes sense.
This project produced well over 10 cubic yards of green waste and debris. Once blackberry gets this large, the canes overlap, fall over each other, climb through shrubs, and grow into everything around them. What looks like one wall of blackberry from the outside can be layer after layer of growth once you start cutting into it.
The basic process was straightforward.
We cut the blackberry down, separated it from the trees and shrubs we wanted to preserve, pruned where necessary, raked the area out, and hauled the debris away.
The hard part is not understanding what to do.
The hard part is the scale.
You cut one section down and suddenly you have a pile of thorny canes that takes up a huge amount of space. Then someone has to move that material. Someone has to load it. Someone has to keep cutting. Someone has to rake behind the crew.
That is why bigger blackberry projects work much better with a team.
One person can cut.
Another person can drag material out.
Another can rake and expose what is underneath.
Another can load the truck.
Then you keep repeating the process until you can actually see the ground again.
And that is really what happened here.
Before the work, the blackberry had taken over most of the area and was hiding the shape of the property underneath it. Once everything was cut back and removed, you could finally see the open space again, along with the existing trees and shrubs that had been buried inside the growth.
The difference is pretty dramatic.
This is also a good example of why blackberry removal gets expensive once it reaches this stage.
You are paying for labor, hauling capacity, tools, disposal, and the amount of time required to move a massive amount of biomass off the property.
It is not complicated work.
It is just a lot of work.
And if you let blackberry grow for years, especially when it gets mixed into trees, shrubs, fences, or property lines, the cleanup gets bigger very quickly.
For Michael’s property, the first goal was simple:
Get the mass of blackberry down, open the property back up, preserve what makes sense, and haul the mess away.
That is exactly what the crew did.
The property looks completely different now.
