Help with blackberry roots where I want to plant a garden

Hello,
I'm new to this forum, but have read a lot of posts and am looking forward to finding some suggestions to our buildings new garden. Everyone here seems to have a lot of great feedback and I hope to beable to add to it as I learn more.

We have a plot of land that we want to divide up into garden beds for interested tenants. The plot is roughly 25'widex100'long. We have several issues that I will try to post in forums appropriate to the individual issue.

In respect to this forum on Garden design & Plant suggestions:

1. This plot used to have extensive black berry bushes which are now gone, but the roots remain. We are not sure how to properly remove the roots. We've heard that pulling up the weeds via a rototiller and laying down black plastic under the beds would do the trick, but we suspect this isn't very environmentally friendly? Apparently there is an enviro friendly black mesh fabric that when doubled or tripled over might work?

2. Approx half of the stretch of the plot doesn't get as much sun as the other half...are their suggestions for vegetables that grow adequately in an area that isn't going to get full sun all day long?

Thanks so much!
Jackie

 

Surprisingly, Blackberries are not that hard to get rid of. The chemical killers won't touch them but, they are really shallow rooted. If they are cut off at or near the ground, use a pitch fork and up root each root ball getting as many remaining roots as possible. Roto-tilling will likely only spread them. If you uproot by hand you will have a few that wiil come up and you can hand pick as they appear.

As for the partial shade areas.. try lettuce, spinach and the rest of the greens, perhaps a good spot for a rhubarb too.

 

Thanks so much, that's great help! We certainly do have our work cut out for us; I can see pulling up the roots from a 25x100' plot of land taking quite some time!

 

This technique worked for me too but in my case we removed an area of blackberry roughly 15' x 400'. That took two of us 3 weeks and many follow ups to complete. Birds still disperse seeds and they pop up routinely.

Cheers, LPN.