Blackberry Hoe

Here's a tool designed specifically to grub out the Northwest's most noxious weed--the Himalayen Blackberry. And it makes short work of ivy too.
When we bought our acreage in Boring, Oregon, it came with a generous endowment of Himalayen blackberry, an invader that is to the Northwest what the Kudzu is to the Southeast. I spent days grubbing out blackberry thicket, canes, root runs and seedlings. After removing 20-foot-long, one-inch-thick canes from a holly tree I decided that if you're really bad and end up in Hell for eternity, that's probably what the devil makes you do. I used various tools for grubbing out both blackberry and a foot-thick mat of English ivy from our property. The lack of a single tool suited to the task led me to invent our Blackberry Hoe. The tool combines a four inch wide mattock blade for excavating and cutting roots with a large claw, patterned after the one on a framing hammer. Blackberry roots run a ways then drop a taproot then run further, taproot run and so forth. The claw is used to rip the taproots from the soil much as you'd pry a nail from a plank. I use a 36-inch long hickory adze handle so you have plenty of levering power. The Blackberry hoe head is forged of 1/4-inch thick steel and welded to a tapered adze eye socket of 1/8-inch steel tubing. To extract small blackberry seedlings you swing the tool to drive the mattock blade full depth just to the far side of the seedling. A bit of levering and a hearty tug pulls out a four-by-four inch cube of soil including the seedling. For grubbing thickly matted ivy I find the best technique is to use a sharp spade or edging tool to cut the ivy patch into a grid of 2-foot squares. Drive the blade through the roots deep into the soil. Then, starting with the outermost sections of the grid, use the Blackberry Hoe's blade to chop the above ground roots off flush. Use the claw to pry up underground roots. You can use the Blackberry's Hoe's blade for making the initial grid cuts but a spade can be driven deeper and makes a neater job of it. You'll find lots of other uses for a Blackberry Hoe. We're plagued by industrial size dandelions, burdock and thistle and the tool does an excellent job of rogueing them out. As with all bladed tools, sharpen often. don't wait until the blade is dead dull to file the edge. Instead, work like a butcher, honing frequently to maintain a keen edge