Gardening as a Contact Sport

I love picking wild blackberries to eat each June, but boy, I sure don’t like the plants. Especially today. We are reclaiming two areas of the flower garden that have been completely overgrown with weedy mats of grass, sumac trees, and blackberry bushes.

Blackberry bushes are MEAN.  If you have never encountered a wild blackberry bush, let me introduce you.

They start out all innocent looking…like a wild rose. Rose-like white flowers, long slender canes. Ah, spring, you think, and enjoy a few white flowers.

Then there are berries…kind of sour, but a bit of sugar and they’re great on waffles.

And then….there are more…and more…..and the damn things just keep coming.

They grow slender canes. Little shoots. Big gigantic thorns.  Heck, even the LEAVES have thorns.

We pulled them up….and they kept coming back. They grew among the stones in the garden, they grew up among the pallets of stones, they grew anywhere.

Today, John took a pickaxe to them. I wore heavy gloves, but it didn’t matter. Every time I’d grasp a shoot I’d get stung.  Everywhere the blackberry thorns pricked my skin, I have welts like blisters.  I look like I have the freaky chicken pox on my arms, my legs, my hands – everywhere. The darn thorns pricked through my jeans, through my sweatshirt and through suede – yes SUEDE – gloves.

I tossed them in the woods. I seriously considered, for one fleeting minute, erecting a barricade of blackberries and brambles along our property line. That way if we have, say, a Zombie invasion, the Zombies will be stopped at the perimeter by ugly, thick blackberry thorns.

Gagh.  Hate those plants. Out they go!

Oh, and the area we cleared today?

It’s getting a nice, sweet weeping cherry.

Thank God it’s Friday. I can’t take any more of this.