Blackberry war

My yard backs up to I'm not sure what, I think it's a battle between the city and the county, there's my fence, 2 plus feet of blackberry bushes and another fence, I have mounds of mole holes and miles of blackberry bushes, allllll along my fence. I have a love hate relationship with these bushes. I love that they are an amazing privacy barrier between my yard and the river...I hate that they over take my fence and yard in what seems like a matter of days in the spring and summer, BUT I do love picking the over-ripe plump berries off of the vine and baking dump cake. So while they are a nuisance, if I cut them back in a timely manner, we can all live together harmoniously.

Today, I decided to try and cut some back... now I know, I should wear long pants, but I get so dang hot, all the time, so I wore shorts, a long sleeve shirt (and a short sleeve tee for part of the time) and of course, gloves, always leather gloves when we are approaching the blackberry bushes... I thought that I had a pair of shears with long blades, but for the life of me, I can't find them. So, I went to work with the little choppers and my hand clippers. I clipped, pulled, swore, chopped, and pulled some more. I'm only 3/4's of the way done... my legs are a mess (as I pretty much knew that they would be, my bad, I know--) My yard waste container is almost full to the rim--I had to rake the front lawn again--if the weather holds (snow ??) I'll cut some of the bigger vines up more and shove them in the container.

After I lost all patience with the blackberry wars and raked, I checked all of my containers... I have a lot of work to do. I can NOT wait for the final frost -- I have daylillies to split, bushes to move into containers, containers to empty into the yard, so much fun stuff !!