Blueberries

[heavyhitterokra]

George's beach sand tomato growing experience reminds me of my great-grandpa.  He said the best tomatoes he ever grew were grown in a gravel bar along Spring Creek, over by Shady Grove. He said the gravels look like they are barren, but whatever is down in there must be really fertile.


Later in his life, that experience lead him to build a hydroponic garden inside his little greenhouse with a coy pond that he pumped his water from. It was a very simple setup, being made of 2x4 lumber covered with sheet metal to form the pea gravel pan. It was slightly tilted, about 12 feet long, sitting on two saw horses, letting water drain into two 55-gallon catchment barrels with a return consisting of an aquarium pump and a filter made of an old polyester pillow stuffed into a 5-gallon bucket. He grew the prettiest tomatoes I've ever seen out there.  His greenhouse was located on Little Joe Creek in Tulsa, somewhere around 53rd street and Lewis Ave.  He was born in 1896, so all of that was farm land back then.  It's all houses and pavement now though.

[heavyhitterokra]

My blueberries are absolutely covered with tiny, light blue, BB-sized fruit sets this morning. Apparently, those nights of covering them with a tarp, over a heat lamp paid off.

Chrysanthemum, how are your berries doing down in Texas? Did your 'Spa-Treatments' pay off?

[chrysanthemum]

My blueberries are kind of a mixed bag. One just completely died, and it’s in the same pot as the one that died previously a couple of years ago. I think it might be more prone to drainage problems or something. There were a lot of flowers on all the plants this spring but not as many berries as I would have expected. I don’t know if some of that was cold damage or wind burn or what. Some of the stems seem to have damaged tips.

I still have five plants, and I’ve been watching some videos on blueberry cuttings, thinking that I want to try to root some. I haven’t done it yet, though, but I’ll need to get to it if I want to do it this season. I did find a pot that I can cover with a little plastic container as a humidity dome. I filled it with peat and cottonseed meal and have been keeping it moist, but I haven’t done any cuttings yet.

If anyone has any advice, I’ll gladly take it.

[heavyhitterokra]

My blueberries are in an 8'x8' foot, dug out bed that I built for them about 10 years ago, by following the advice of a blueberry forum on a gardening website. I never had any luck growing blueberries before I built that bed. It's in a place where I burned out the dead stump of a huge red oak tree. After the stump was gone, I dug the dirt out about 18" inches deep there and refilled it with compressed peat moss bales, topsoil, cow manure, composted sorghum stalks, and Sulfer. That was kind of my 'pet project' that year. Even then, I still had a high rate of failure until I stumbled onto a variety that liked my growing conditions.

The only variety that I've found to do well here is "Climax" It actually spreads and pops up new chutes from the root zone.

Otherwise, I've had decent luck by bending over new wood, scratching a small wound on the bottom side of it to cause it to take root better, and placing a rock over it to keep it in place for a year or two.

Blueberries like more water than we get here in Summer, so I ran a 2' inch PVC pipe from the condensate line of our air conditioner, over to our blueberry bed. (About 20' feet). Anytime the air conditioner is running, the condensation drip-feeds our blueberry bushes. That has seemed to work really well, especially in years that we have a heavy berry load.

Even with all of that pampering, I have bushes dying on a regular bases, all except that very prolific Climax bush, and one scraggly old Premiere blueberry that just keeps hanging on from one year to the next.


 This isn't a very good photo, but it's all I have.  It was taken the day after I removed the tarp and the heat lamp, after the frost.  This bush has hundreds of blooms on it that have now set fruit.

[chrysanthemum]

We’ve toyed with the idea of putting the blueberries in a raised bed of sorts, but we worry that it will be more of a battle with the pH since our ground is so, so, so alkaline (8.3).  Pots can be tricky, and I’m not happy about losing a second bush, but I think we’ll keep them there for now.

Writing about my blueberries made me get on the ball about taking little cuttings.  I took two from each plant that I have and tried to make a key with different colors of yarn to identify them.  The nursery pot I had filled with peat and cottonseed meal had sat out on Wednesday night in a good rainstorm, so it was nice and moist.  It fits in a beautiful ceramic cache pot that I got when my neighbors moved a few years ago, and my humidity “dome” is an old pretzel container that I saved for this reason.



I’m planning to keep the cuttings inside because it’s hard to find a place outside that doesn’t get sun at some point during the day, and it would just fry those little cuttings in no time. During summer we keep a lot of blinds closed to help with the heat, so I might be playing around with the location of the pot for a while.

[heavyhitterokra]

I sure hope your cuttings do well. I've never attempted that with blueberries. I admire your determination. I'm not sure I'd have that much patience.

For me, the blueberries are kind of a pain to take care of, because of the pH needs, the constant summertime watering, and the tarping, due to their tendency to bloom before winter is finished; but the payoff is always worth it in the odd years that I actually have berries to eat as I wander aimlessly about the yard picking fruit and dropping it into my bowl of oatmeal, yogurt, cereal, ice cream, scrambled eggs, pancakes and sausage, blueberry banana bread, or whatever I happen to dream up that day.

I guess that's probably true with all of the fruit. Who knows how many hours I've spent digging holes, planting trees, taking cuttings, rooting cuttings, pruning, tarping, etc. I'm sure it would be cheaper just to buy fruit, but still, I enjoy it.

Like my great-grandpa used to tell me, "The secret to a happy marriage is lots of yard work." 

[chrysanthemum]

I’m not sure it’s determination, so much as desperation. This is my first attempt at blueberry cuttings, and I havent done much by way of tree or shrub cuttings in the past. I have no idea how it will work, but I figure it’s worth a try.

Your quotation from your great grand-grandpa gave me a chuckle, but it also gave me a smile because it made me reflect on how my husband and I spend lots of time together doing yard work. He helps me in the garden when he can, and together we do a lot of tree trimming, tree removal, mulching, and firewood processing. We enjoy it and enjoy working together. Maybe that’s part of why we have such a happy marriage.

[heavyhitterokra]

First ripe blueberries of the season.

I had these for breakfast this morning. There are many, many, more to come. These bushes are loaded with thousands of berries this year.  My little camera and my poor photography skills don't do them justice.

[heavyhitterokra]

Blueberries Galore!

The bushes are loaded this year! I started picking the Premiere variety on May 31st, they have played out now and any survivors have long since turned to raisins, but the Climax variety is just beginning to come on strong!

I picked my first half-gallon of the Climax variety tonight.

I used to take the kids to go picking berries at Blueberry Acres, about a mile and a half Southwest of here. They had 15 acres of berries and it was close enough to home that we have actually walked there before. Blueberry Acres starts picking at 6:00 am and they close at 10:00 am because the heat in the berries cause them to spoil, so only the 'early-bird' gets the worm so to speak.

They used to pay $5.00 per gallon, so it was a good way for the kids to make a little extra spending money. After we got paid, I'd take them to Dollar Tree to buy a few treats and we'd call it a day. One time, we bought the berries that we picked that day, minus our $5.00 per gallon picking fee, and took them to Starbucks to re-sell them for $32.00 per gallon. (Starbucks made blueberry smoothies from the fresh berries that we sold them). !!!GOOD STUFF!!! We'd trade part of our commission for smoothies.

While picking berries to sell, we came up with a homemade invention to let us pick with both hands, while the berry bucket hung from our belts. We designed the bucket hanger and built them from old steel coat hangers. The kids used a Folgers coffee can to hang from their belts, because they were only 10 or 12 years old at the time. I used a gallon pail. The bucket supports worked really well and helped us to pick faster than most of the people around us.

I'll try to attach a few photos, in case anyone out there would like to copy our design.


This is a photo of the hanger along side the Folgers Coffee can.

This is a photo of the coffee can hanging from a belt.

This is a photo of the hanger hooked to the coffee can, before it is attached to the belt.  The 'U' part of the hanger is inserted into a small hole drilled in the side of the coffee can.

This is a photo of the hanger by itself, just to get a better idea of how it's bent.  The 'U' part of the hanger hooks into a small hole drilled in the side of the coffee can.  The two woopty-doos, bent from the shoulder of the hanger are what hooks over your belt.

These are our berry bushes.  It's just an 8' x 8' foot bed where we filled in an old tree stump hole in our back yard with top soil and lots of Sulfur.  I piled up layers of straw, top soil, green plant matter, cow manure, and sprinklings of Sulfur, then let that compost all summer and planted four berry bushes, two Premiers, two Climax in the Fall.  That was probably 10 years ago.  They have really grown a lot since then.  The posts are 6' feet tall, topped with old tennis balls, so I can tarp the bushes in early Spring to prevent frost damage.  The bushes are at least a foot taller than the posts.  I probably need to prune them a little?

This is the 2" inch PVC pipe that leads from our air conditioner condensate drain to our bushes.  Every time the A/C comes on, our berries get watered by the moisture in the air that collects on the coils and runs out by gravity into our berry patch.  It hasn't rained in about a month, so the ground out there is getting kind of crispy.  Without the condensate watering system, our berries wouldn't be much come mid-July.  In years past, this little Climax berry bush has had berries as late as October.  I really like that variety, for it's longevity.  The Premiere berries all get ripe at once, the Climax berries are ever-bearing and only get ripe a few at a time.  Most of them are still small and green right now.  Tonight was the first picking from the Climax bushes.  The Premiere berries started getting ripe in late-May and just played out about a week ago.  We ate the Premiere berries fresh. I'll freeze these berries and make blueberry banana bread with them all winter long.  In a good year, I get about 3 gallons of berries over the course of a season.  I got my first half-gallon tonight.

[woodeye]

Oh man, that is outstanding, HeavyHitter!! 

I've never seen a blueberry growing in person, only pictures. They look awesome, as does your turbo picking bucket invention.
That's good too, I don't have to worry about copyright infringement if I decide to make myself one for picking cherry tomatoes.

Good Job!!

[heavyhitterokra]

That ought to work well for picking cherry tomatoes. I never thought of using it for that. I used to use a half-bushel wooden fruit basket to pick my cherry tomatoes. The half-bushel would hold about 30 pounds.

In my younger days, I grew 300 caged tomato plants, mostly slicers, only a few dozen red, orange, and gold, cherry varieties, and a few little red and yellow pear varieties. I'd charge $4.00 per quart basket for the cherry and the little pear tomatoes. A half-bushel would fetch about $125.00 I always felt bad thinking how little effort that was to pick a half-bushel of them for that price, but people would buy them up just as fast as I could bring them to town, so I suppose it was a fair price? It's really hard for me to ask money for a thing that I have had in such abundance all of my life that it doesn't seem it ought to be a thing you charge people for.

[rdback]

Nice looking blueberry bushes Ron, and nifty bucket hanger. I just might build myself one of those.

Of course then I'd have to go find a belt!

[heavyhitterokra]

That bucket hanger will work without a belt, you can just hook it over your waistband.

[heavyhitterokra]

Pickle Diary

My Mom was born in September of 1941, just a few months before the War started. Her family was poor, but they got along just fine by farming and putting up everything they could from their garden, their orchard, their hog house, their henhouse, farm pond, hay field, and milking shed. They had a brooder house with 100 laying hens and a few old milk cows on a 40-acre farm. Grandpa baled hay and sold it. He hauled fuel oil, and sold cream, milk, and eggs. Somehow, they always got by.

Mama was the youngest of thirteen kids. Because of their age spread, two of her sisters were already married and one was pregnant at the same time Mama was born. Can you even imagine what that must have been like, living with that many siblings?

Mama was in her 30s during the 1970s and was into reviving the old ways that she had grown up with all of her life; she didn't like the change she saw. She didn't wear high heels or Miniskirts; she wore Maxidresses and sensible shoes. She was the valedictorian of her class and took notes about what grandma was doing daily. By the time we were teenagers grandpa had passed away, so Mama was helping Grandma with her chores, her canning, and her gardening on a daily basis.  Mama read all of the latest Fox Fire books and lived without air conditioning or running water. In Winter, she heated our house with wood, she cooked on a wood-burning cookstove the year 'round. She had an ice box that was kept cool by placing a 50-pound block of ice in the top. We didn't have an electric refrigerator or a TV set.

Every Summer, when canning season rolled around, Mama kept what she called, a "Pickle Diary." Each jar of pickles she made had a little piece of masking tape attached to it with just a few words about the day. She'd date the message and write something like, "James fell off the bed yesterday and broke his collarbone. I was so scared! I rushed him to the doctor and they bandaged him up. He's okay now, resting on a pallet on the living room floor, no more high beds for him!"

Or, "It was hot and miserable outside today, but we had a great harvest of green beans, I'll sure be glad when they are all canned, so we can cool off in the creek."

She might write, "We hauled 1,500 bales of hay last week, so not much time for gardening, I'm so far behind!"

Or, "It's such a beautiful day outside right now, I'd rather be fishing, but we're canning new potatoes instead."

After she died in 1978, I cherished reading those old jars that we found down in the cellar.

Because of reading so many of those 'pickle diary' notes growing up, I try to keep the tradition alive, by writing notes on freezer bags before I put them in the freezer. I have so many notes written on so many jars that it's possible no one will ever read them all, but it's like finding a little piece of treasure to dig out an old bag of blueberries from 2015 and read what you were doing on the day that you socked them away in the freezer.

On that note, I'm still picking blueberries. The hot sun and zero rain in the month of July turned them into little raisins, so I never finished harvesting them last month; they were too dehydrated to enjoy. To my great surprise, they held tight to the bushes, and then when we got the rains in August, the berries rehydrated. I would have thought that to be impossible, but I see it every day now.

This morning, I made time to harvest a few more of them. There are thousands and thousands of berries to be picked, so this will take some time. I picked until about 9:00 am this morning. By that time it was getting so hot and humid out there, after yesterday's downpour, I decided to put it off until evening.

While picking this morning, I got another half gallon of berries for the freezer. (You know I wrote a little message for later on the freezer bags). I'll be glad I took the time to do that when Winter comes.


So many berries this year!

[hmoosek]

heavyhitterokra chrysanthemum

This was a pure joy to read!