I hope I have reached the limit of my blueberry obsession, so that I can just sit back and watch them grow, instead of hunting out where to get more plants, hahaha. About two weeks ago I bought three more blueberry plants from two varieties that are new to me. I now have 4 varieties so I have more than enough for cross pollination and a long season of berry picking. My trial of growing blueberries in South Africa is going well as the season warms up.
These are the varieties I have growing:
Planted in 2014:
Tifblue x 1
Brigitta x 2
Planted today / spring 2015:
Centurion x 1
Legacy x 2
Legacy according to info available online, consistently ranks amongst the best in USDA taste trials. I can’t wait to taste the berries. One of the plants had a couple of blossoms on when I bought it, so I left them on to cross pollinate my other varieties and of course to taste them.
I decided on a whim to plant the three new varieties together in one fairly large window box. It is a fancy one from Builders Warehouse, with little feet and a complicated looking drainage system. I should have taken pictures before filling it with soil.
For future reference this is the order in which I planted them. Centurion in the middle and Legacy on the outside. Hoping that spread will also contribute to cross pollination.
I think planting varieties of blueberry plants together like this would make a great gift for a friend, or be a wonderful space saver if you live in a flat or complex. If / when we move this will be a lot less hassle than the plants I’ve got in the huge terra cotta pots.
I used my trusted mix of equal parts Acid compost, peat and perlite. I happened to half left over cow manure, so I added that as well towards the end. I didn’t add any ammonium sulphate this time. I will use organic feeds like BounceBack pellets and fish emulsion until I see signs of trouble / too much alkalinity.
For my older plants, I decided since my hands were already dirty from the digging and manure, I may as well give them a spring feeding. I had give. Them a bit of fish emulsion earlier, but decided to give the. The traditional cow manure as the blueberry farmers do in North America. I shifted a bit of the pine bark mulch and saw their very shallow root systems. I put just over a handful of manure around each plant, watered them well with collected rain water (another good source of acid), and covered them up again.
Something interesting I saw on both the Brigitta plants is that they’ve put out runners / side shoots. I’ve read that if I cover the base with soil and wait a couple of seasons, they’ll develop enough of their own root systems to be cut off from the mother plants to make new plants. Pretty cool.
