Goats, however, need considerable management themselves.
You might be able to rent some, though. I’ve read that it’s possible to rent sheep to mow lawns.
– unless there’s an awful lot of blackberries, though, a long-handled set of heavy-duty shears and some good gloves, followed by repeated close mowing for a couple of years, would most likely be simpler.
We could do this in its own thread… But yeah, goats are not exactly cats. BUT they do the hell out of blackberries! We had a neighbor lady who let us borrow hers for a while (I was a little kid (heh) at the time so I don’t recall how ling it took to clear the 40x80ft patch. But I DO remember me and my brother helping mom to clear it a couple times. Each of us would slide a 2x4 along the ground and lift, and then mom would cut the stem. Repeat. Then BONFIRE! Didn’t come back after the goat though.
Now that I can’t get fresh blackberries I feel like there is a special place in hell for what people like us done.
I read a book once by a guy who gave up a high-salaried financial executive career in New York and ran off, with his wife, to homestead a plot of land deep in a Canadian forest. He wrote a whole book on it, with each chapter detailing some aspect of how they lived. He mentions that there were whole fields of wild blackberries. When the blackberry harvest season came, he and his wife would spend all day for a couple of weeks collecting blackberries. Then his wife would cook and can them, and they had and entire year of blackberry preserves from that.
He had a similar comment about hunting moose. It took him a week or two in the wilderness to bag a moose, but when it was skinned and cleaned and butchered and cut up into fillets, there was enough good meat for two people to have a pound of meat a day each for a year. They dug a pit in the permafrost and that was their year-round freezer.
Neat! I have a tiny patch in the middle of my back yard, like 18"x18". Dunno where it came from, it just arrived like 5 years ago. It’s so pretty, I took pictures of my dogs with it. The flowers last a really long time! Like 2 weeks! I’m jealous of your lawn.
My back yard is a mix of grasses and clover (and 1/4 sq ft of periwinkle). It used to be full of fruit trees but I got rid of them all. The grass doesn’t seem to be intimidated by the clover. Then again, I’ve never tried to intentionally plant it.
I’ll tell you what, tho. The grass/clover doesn’t seem to be intimidated by anything. Every year in August for the past 3 years I had a mud pit in the yard after a day of hosting a giant slip-n-slide, and by September you wouldn’t even notice anything had been there.
Very pretty pictures 
But I think those are violas, which I also love. Seeds are readily available if you want to try to spread it farther.
Well, now don’t spray your lawn with broad leave herbicides. They are terrible for the environment, and prevent a healthy mixed species rather than a useless monoculture lawn. Glechoma hederacea is edible and bees like it. It is invasive but so is most lawn grass.
Good idea.
Clover is great and makes for a healthy lawn with less watering and fertilizing.
I plant white clover in my lawn from time to time. It does not outcompete the lawn. It does establish itself, and it usually flourishes until I have a drought. Then it dies out of the sunny areas. My grass is more drought tolerant than my clover. I know the literature says otherwise, but that’s been my experience. And that’s why I reseed from time to time – tossing some clover seed around is easy enough.
I am very happy to have some clover in the lawn. It helps the grass, it helps the bees, and it’s pleasant to walk on.
Some culinary herbs make very good groundcovers - a mix of creeping thyme, creeping rosemary and creeping oreganum not only has use in the kitchen, but nice flowers and lovely scents.
Live in Colorado and tried to plant a clover lawn in front of the beehives and failed. Got it doing well with a lot of water in the first year, but it didn’t come back the second year. The drought got it - watered it a couple of times after the spring storms and watched it wither. It takes too much water to try again.
But not when the flowers are out. I had a little pool in my yard one summer and got stung on my foot 3 different times while walking the 10’ from the pool to the deck. Those darn bees, thought they had right-of-way just because there was clover! 