Radius Solis wrote:It being the dead of winter here, I have little to say about gardening, other than that I'm looking forward to the beginnings of spring. But what you're doing is pretty cool. We have raspberries... and blackberries, but oh god I would not plant those. No, I spend dozens to hundreds of hours per year on trying to destroy them. They are pest plants, here, like nothing else. One seedling sprouts from bird plop and a decade later you've lost four acres of land to it. I've seen from the road multiple-square-mile stretches of nothing but blackberries, in many places in this state, and it is actually now not only illegal to deliberately cultivate them, but you can be fined for failing to eradicate them from your property - which reduces the problem to a matter of law enforcement. Yet still the fucker spreads.
I have brambles/wild blackberries in the hedges, but they're not that bad as long as I cut them regularly. To get an impenetrable thicket I think I'd have to leave them alone for a year or two at least. And the ones I've planted for berry production are cultivated thornless varieties which are supposed to be a bit less vigorous than the original wild plant.
Other invasive weeds that I have in the new garden, or at least the ones I know about: bindweed, ground elder, ground ivy... but the worst, by far, has to be the neighbour's sumacs. The bloody things spread like crazy via the roots, and when we first moved in I had to spend several days removing a thicket that had sprung up in the course of less than a year while the property was on the market. By the time I was done, the closest tree on the neighbour's side of the fence was looking a bit sickly, which was probably because I'd chopped up half its root system in the process. I'm expecting to have to constantly dig up its attempts to re-establish itself on my side.
Are brambles native to your part of the USA? It often seems to be the foreign species which are the most annoying.
Mint, I don't know, I've heard horror stories, and so I would never let it out of its pot. It certainly appears to be quite aggressive - every year I have to cut off three-foot arching stolons that attempt to take root outside the pot.
I do like growing lemon balm, which is a clumping plant in the same family. It does seed very freely, but I don't mind self-seeders because mostly if you catch them young there's no problem. It's plants that spread aggressively via roots that are the most frustrating weeds to deal with.
We also have apples, but sadly they are inedible, as our area is infested by apple maggot. You cut one open and you see little brown flecks and channels throughout the flesh of the fruit, and occasionally the squirming little larvae that made them. I wish we could just cut down the damned tree.
Aren't there any pheromone traps or similar that you can use? There were some larvae in the fruit of an dwarf early-fruiting apple I have in a pot this year, but it wasn't too bad because I spotted them early. I just picked the apples a few weeks early, cut out the holey bits and ate the rest... they were a bit sharper than if I'd left them to mature, but perfectly palatable.
EDIT: so basically, the sumacs out-competed the brambles in thicket-forming.