Blueberries – Beautiful Chaos

Up-date on our Berry garden

Trying to save the blueberries with a thick layer of leaves

My Blueberry bushes looked miserable last year and they gave only a handful of fruit. When we bought them the year before they where packed with fruit, so there must be a reason the blueberry bushes are not very happy.

One problem could be lack of water. We did not water them last growing season. Although the soil is very moisture retaining, there could have been too little moisture.

Another problem could have been the fact that they where overgrown last spring. We just timely did not manage to maintain the berry garden.

Another problem could be that the soil is not acidic enough. An indication for that are the leaves, which are not a nice bright green, but tend to a slightly yellower green. This could indicate that the ph-level is not to there liking.

To improve the berry garden we mowed the grass and weeds short and divided a thick layer of leaves over the entire patch. Obviously it will take some time for the leaves to decompose and for the ph-level to change, but the thick layer of leaves will also retain moisture much better and will keep the weed pressure down. This way we tackle 3 problems at once.

After a few weeks some weeds still came trough, so we will have to pull these out and improve the mulch layer. Since we do not have any more leaves we will use woodchips for that.

We interplant the blueberries with currants after clearing and removing some of the raised beds from our garden 2. That might have been a bad idea, but at the moment we do not have a suitable place from them. We are planning to expand our berry garden, but we have to get rid of all of the couch grass and the weeds there first. After we succeed with that we will relocate the currant bushes to give the blueberry bushes there needed space back.

Here are some impressions taken on 2 different dates:

A berry patch with a big currant in front and a mulch layer of leaves

A blueberry twig with flowers with the sun in the background

A white currant bush packed with flowers

A black currant twig with, still unripe, berries

A white currant twig with, still unripe, berries, where a lot of berries are missing — **Apparently the wetter was partially too bad for the pollinators to fly, since a lot of berries are missing on the vine. Or maybe they froze…**

Where are the blueberries?

Was it a bad idea to clear the patch from all the weeds?

After planting the blueberry bushes we covered the surrounding soil with woodchips. What we had forgotten was to put cardboard down first, so after a few months the blueberry patch looked like in the picture above.

We made it a family affair and started weeding. We even needed to dig up some of the bigger weeds, but freeing the first blueberry bush and seeing how well it looked was very nice.

A small blueberry bush with woodchips at its feed against a background of weeds

The only down side is that we only found a handful of (obvious still unripe) blueberries on the bushes.

After a few days I noticed that the blueberries did not look so good anymore. The leafs are not really green anymore. Was it sunburn?

We left some of the flowering “weeds” for the bees.

A few daisies against a background of woodchips and weeds — **Daisies**

A big malve bush with pink flowers against a background of woodchips and weeds — **Malve**

Making a blueberry patch

Taking another step in building our food forest

For my last birthday I wished for some blueberry bushes to plant in our garden. We love the taste of blueberries and what we love so much we need to grow our selves. There is nothing compared to the taste of berries which are self grown and freshly picked and eaten right there in the garden.

So we went and purchased 10 blueberry bushes last fall. It took a little while before we actually planted them, but finally we did. Blueberries need acetic soil and we have this corner in our garden 3 where we filled up a big hole with sawdust, bark and smaller pieces of wood from our sawmill a few years ago. We finished this of with a layer of normal soil. The organic matter has been decomposing and we thought the time was right for planting by now.

The blueberry bushes should be planted 2 meters apart, but we just divided the 10 bushes on the designated patch. I always find it difficult to respect the recommended plant spacing. The blueberry patch still looks so empty with only the 10 blueberry bushes and a panicle hydrangea. After planting we divided a thick layer of woodchips over the entire blueberry patch. At first it looked really tidy and ratter empty. The naked blueberry bushes where hard to see against the background of the woodchips. Obviously the woodchips did not really hold down the weeds, but at least the blueberries have gotten there leaves now and the blueberry patch does not look so empty any more.