2024 - What I did today

Finished pruning out last year's canes of the thug blackberry then attempted to restrain the many new trailing canes. It's planted along neighbour's fence but its growth is trained out into our garden along a 12 - 15' stock fence at right angle to neighbour forming a T. This year it has taken to not only travelling into our purpose built leg of the T, but extending along the top of the T along neighbour's fence. It is a thoroughly anti social so and so and caught on to their dog as he was investigating, so to be neighbourly I should bend the errant canes round into ours. There was I in the middle of half a dozen evil lengths of some 15ft canes trapped. It had me by the front, side and middle and wouldn't let go. It drew blood in several places. P was all for letting thug have its evil way to fill a gap in the hedge but I persuaded him it wasn't fair to a non gardening family with a dog, soon to be two (they're getting a puppy field spaniel). Mission accomplished, we then planted several privet in the gap where thug had vacated. I resolved to buy a replacement blackberry, probably thornless.