We planted blackberries a few years ago… and, to be honest, I did not record the ‘when’ in my gardening journal. Darn! We planted Arapaho berries then. And later, a friend gave us some starts she had been thinning from her patch.

Sweet Husband put them along a nice hog panel and even made a lovely brick surrounding! However, as you can see above, the bricks ended up getting overgrown and the vines weren’t pruned as they should be.

The entire patch was dragging me down a bit. And, although we did get a lovely harvest there last summer, I decided I wanted to revamp the patch. The kids and I had time Friday and so jumped in!

We began by taking the t-posts up and then the hog panels. It really was some effort as the grass had grown over the panels at the bottom. I trimmed and pruned in obvious places, but not as I should have in early spring.

The kids took a break (we’d been doing some sort of work all morning) and I had some quiet time, digging up the bricks. I turned on a Susan Hunt YouTube video to listen to and took it slow. That portion didn’t take very long with a sharp spade! I had saved newspaper to lay down under the mulch. I wet it to help it stay put as I added mulch little bits at a time.

Once we got the mulch down (the kids came back by this time), we loaded the tools and buckets up and put them away. We came back with my cart and loaded those very heavy bricks. Wow! Lots of muscles used. After they were put away, we had to call it an evening and had a voice recital to attend and participate in!

The final piece was to add the wire in two places for the actually trellising! Sweet Husband helped with this and, since the t-posts were only 6 feet tall, we put the wire at 18” and 42”. Come late summer, I’ll prune in a big way! And, I plan to propagate some and possibly add more bushes for our family. I hope to keep you posted on how this system works!

What do you think? Any tips are appreciated!