Roger's Pick: Success with Blueberries

How about growing blueberries in the garden this year? This is a good season to set them out. What could be more wholesome and fresher than the sheer enjoyment of plucking blueberries right off of your own hedge? The berries don’t ripen all at once, so it can be a daily pilgrimage to harvest a cup or two at a time from a few plants.

With the advancement of plant breeding over the years, many new varieties of blueberries have been developed successfully for Southern California. The Southern Highbush types now offer selected varieties and are available locally.

Use amendments like peat moss, leaf mold, and wood shavings to enhance and build up the right acidic soil environment for the plants with about 30 to 50 percent of organic material. Our decomposed granite here allows for good drainage which the berry plants enjoy. Plant them about four to six feet apart when setting them out in a sunny area of the garden.

I apply a good two to four inches of mulch to keep the soil cool, suppress weeds, and retain moisture which allows for the build up of beneficial mycorrizhae (a good soil microbe). Keep the soil moist during the summer time and feed with an acid-type of fertilizer that you would use for your camellia or azaleas. I like using fish emulsion and feed my blueberries from spring till fall every two months.

If you stage your blueberry patch with different types, you can have about two months of berries to pluck in the summer time as the plants mature. The flowers are tiny white to pinkish bell shaped, almost like lily of the valley flowers.

Blueberries bear fruit on the ends of canes that are at least one year old. In winter, while plants are dormant and resting, cut out twiggy growth to foster good air circulation, remove low prostrate growth to maintain a vase like shape.

The following are some varieties to look for

Misty: early season type that enjoys being with other types for pollination. It requires approximately 300 hours of chilling in the winter months. Berries are large to medium in size and of excellent quality.

O Neal: Very early with medium large and dark blue fruit of good quality and wonderful flavor which needs about 500 hours of chilling

Jubilee: Is a midseason type that can handle heavier soils through summer heat and sudden winter cold.

Sharpblue: This is the leading and most adaptable variety in low chill areas, which can grow up to six feet at maturity. It is an early type for milder zones with fewer than 500 hours required.

Southmoon: A midseason variety with exceptional berries and superior flavor, it performs well inland and on the coast as well with chilling hours that reach 500 hours.

The “chilling-hours” is a measurement of accumulated hours of temperatures below 45 degrees in the winter season. Most Southern Highbush are self-pollinating, but the berries will be larger if two varieties are planted in the adjoining area of the garden.

Maddock Nursery here in Fallbrook has a great selection of blueberries in various sizes to select from. So let’s get a few in the ground for they are extremely nutritious and what could be better than harvesting your own to make some blueberry pies this summer? Bon appétit!

Roger Boddaert, Maker of Natural Gardens, can be reached at (760) 728-4297.