My wife’s parents have 165 acre farm with wild blackberries and wild black raspberries growing all over. I have noticed in the last few years that some of the larger bushes of blackberries have been declining. They are starting to get overgrown with weeds, vines, and other things. Would it be advantageous to brush hog some of these areas to give them a chance to grow back or would we just be wasting our time?
Here are some pictures of my 2yo daughter picking some of them yesterday. She ate about twice as many as she put in the container!
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I have around 3 acres of fields around my home… that several years ago… I used to have bushogged once a year in the fall.
So everything that grew out there had a full season to grow before being cut down.
The wild blackberries would send up primocanes and in some locations they would be quite thick (a nice patch).
That fall… i could tell my bushhog guy to leave a few of the best patches and i harvested berries from them the next season.
After a few years that patch would sort of play out… and I let him bushhog it.
I have been having my fields bushogged 2x a year the last several years… normally June and October… but there are still wild blackberries that come up. They dont give up easily.
Huh, bushhoging…we always just used our 20 hp riding lawnmower to knock back a scrawny patch eating the orchard. It mowed down those Himalayans at the cost of destroying belts.
Ya a lawnmower wouldn’t fair so well in the areas that these blackberries are growing!
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