Missnish,
I have all my 70 to 80 blueberry bushes planted in 55 gallon blue barrels cut in half which makes nice large 25-30 gallon pots for the bushes. The plants need full sun and must never be allowed to dry out. The best potting soil is a mixture of pine bark and ground up peat (with coffee grounds mixed in). Blueberry bushes are acid loving plants and want a 5 to 5.5 PH. A top 2" to 3" layer of pine straw helps keep the roots cool in the hot Florida sun.

Lou

Please read up on the link I posted of prior questions we had... It should answer most of your questions.

Here is a link that might be useful: Blueberry Lovers

Missnish,

The blueberries you have are of the rabbiteye type. They do need 400 or so chill hours. Not sure where you are located but if you are Ocala north you would be fine or if you live in a cold pocket. For me they don't do well due to lack of chill but Lou is just 6 miles south of me and is much colder.....i am in a bit of a warm micro climate and Lou a cold micro climate.

Insanity...doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. That is me with blueberries. Don't plant them in the ground would be my number 1 suggestion. Do what Lou does. If your pH is too high in the ground it is next to impossible to get it low enough. Failure is assured.

Laura,

I grow about 200 BB all of them in the ground. The soil PH is not the problem it is the bicarbonates in the irrigation water. In that case in the ground or in a pot you are still going to have an issue. It is easy to overcome the irrigation water using acid.....it is what I do and what the commercial folks do. Lou has a perched watertable so basically his well is a big underground puddle of rainwater so he is lucky.

BR,
You fail to mention the incredible work you did preparing the ground with wood chips the year or so prior to planting those blueberry bushes. Somebody with just a few bushes would not go through all that trouble preparing the ground a foot plus deep a year or two in advance of planting. It's much easier for them to make a good potting mix in a 15 gallon or larger pot. Also having the bushes planted in pots will allow them to move the pots around to find the best part of their yard for what they are growing.

Lou

Lou,

I agree with you 100% that pots are easier.

or you can do a raised bed filled with a mixture of peat moss and pine fines, topped with a nice thick layer of pine straw mulch. second season with my blueberries and they seem to be doing okay to me. the weekly fertilizer drench helped a lot.

What are you guys fertilizing your blueberries with? I planted two Sunshine Blue blueberries in containers last year. They seem to be healthy and have fruit on them. I have them covered with bird netting to ensure that I'll get to try at least one berry when they ripen. I've fertilized them a few times with Miracid, but should I be doing something else? I have them in a 5-1-1 mix (pine fines, peat, and vermiculite).

Also, I'm no scientist so please keep it simple for my simple mind :-)

Thanks,
Annette

Annette,

Miracid / Camellia formula is a fine fertilizer. If you want the bushes to get bigger faster try ammonium sulfate. One teaspoon per gallon of water once a week. Just make sure the soil is moist when you use it.

BR,

Thanks for the help. Do I use the ammonium sulfate instead of fertilizer or use both?

Ifionlyhadabrain,

Lol nice screen name:)

Ammonium sulfate is 21-0-0 so it is just nitrogen but is in a form the plants really like. You need to basically have two different plans, one for in ground and mulched and the other for in pots.

Last year I gave my 200 ish in ground BB only ammonium sulfate week after week. Just once the entire season did I give them a balanced fertilizer that had n-P-k and micros. Plants will tell you if they are short of something but they generally just need mostly the nitrogen. Mulched and in ground they get a lot of what they need from the mulch.

In pots in a pine fines and peat mix the mix is pretty devoid of nutrients so you have to feed the plants a fertilizer like 12-4-8 just make sure the mix does not have muriate of potash in it and that the nitrogen is from a urea source. You can alternate one week ammonium sulfate the next week a balanced fertilizer. Just divide how much you would apply in a month and divide it up in to smaller weekly feedings.

In ground is easier if you have problem water as most of us in Florida will have. Our water is loaded with bicarbonates from our limerock aquifer so it is basically like pouring lime on your plants and being acid loving plants BB don't like that at all. In ground is easier because if you mulch heavily you will have to water less. In pots you have to water more and the bicarbonates in the water will quickly overwhelm the soils ability to acidify....the plants get chlorotic and decline. My friend Lou is blessed with very good water.....he has a percheed water table and basically his well is in a puddle of rainwater 100 feet down. But that is a rare exception here in Florida.

I do what the commercial folks do which is use sulfuric acid to "remove" the bicarbonates from the water. It does not take much to do it and it makes a HUGE difference in the plants. It makes them go from being hard to grow to simple.
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This series is for South Florida, but parts one and three have some good general tips.

http://www.examiner.com/article/how-to-plant-southern-highbush-blueberries-south-florida

Here is a link that might be useful: Blueberries

BB,
Your BBs look awesome! I'm going to follow your instructions. Where do you get sulfuric acid from and is it just called SA? Also, I meant perlite not vermiculite.

Kasima,
Looks like I picked the right BB for my small FL yard! Thanks for the link!

IfIonlyhadabrain,

First the disclaimer:) Use at your own risk.if you want more information on using it I will link to the University of Florida at the bottom.

SA is somewhat dangerous, have to keep it away from kids but it is not like in the cartoons:) You just have to be smart....if it gets on your dry skin it will burn/itch a little but not much, just wipe it off, no damage done. It needs moisture to really work and because of that it is VERY dangerous to your eyes. Remember it is always add acid to water NEVER water to acid.

Sulfuric acid is simply battery acid. Every auto parts store will have it. Will come in a pint? container and is cheap. For those with quite a few plants NAPA sells it by the 5 gallons but a pint will last you years I would guess. It is 33% sulfuric acid....the stuff I use is 96% sulfuric acid and comes in a 55 gallon barrel but is the same except for the concentration.

SA is GRAS (generally regarded as safe) and is the most widely used chemical in the world. There are no grades so the stuff they use for food is the same stuff that goes in a cars battery or in this case irrigation water.

What you will need is to work out how much you need to use and that is different for each persons water. Once you know the amount you don't have to test it again. You will need to buy low PH test paper...like $10? Amazon is a good source. I will use a 5 gallon bucket as the example but you could just as easily have a dedicated 55 gallon barrel with the top cut off or a 32 gallon trash can...whatever.

So you take your 5 gallon bucket and fill it up with your water. Take the acid and pour it in to a jar and using a eye dropper put in say 5 drops, mix it up and test the water with the PH paper. At first as you add acid the PH won't change and you might be tempted to add a lot more acid, don't. What is happening is as you add the acid the acid is changing the bicarbonates in the water in to gypsum, same stuff that the sheet rock in your home is made from. It is stable and inert in the soil. As you add the acid at some point the bicarbonates will all be converted and at that point the PH will drop off rapidly. So you just keep adding the acid 5 drops at a time and stir, test. When the PH paper codes as PH 5 you are set. So if it took say 10 drops to make it go to PH 5 the next time you water you fill the bucket, add 10 drops, stir and water. It is that simple. A garbage can would probably be easier as you will have a reserve of water. There is no need to take the water below PH 5, the acidic soil will acidify it a bit more.

Any questions ask away but it is very very simple.

Here is a link that might be useful: University of Florida

I know it's too soon but after it's fruited where would you prune this plant? It' about 5-1/2' tall and the biggest came is 1-1/4" in diameter. The red marks are my best guess. Am I close?

Apajim,

Cute pup.

Pruning is subjective of course. That red line in your picture on the big cane, you want to remove that? Why? If it is still productive I would leave it.

The plant is pretty leggy I would try to make it more full so will explain the cuts.

1. That small cane is very horizontal. If you cut it about 4-6" up from the crown it should send out new canes that hopefully will be more vertical. If 3. is connected to 1. ignore the pruning mark. Just hard to tell in the picture.

2. and all those lines around it at the same level on the right.. That is your best bet for making the bush more full. You might think the cuts are very low but look at the black stick drawing on the left I added. The horizontal lines indicate where you would pinch. When you cut a stem it will respond by putting out two or more buds. If you let those two buds grow a foot then pinch the bud out on each of them they in turn will each branch and you now have 4+ branches.....let them each grow up a foot and pinch all 4 and they will bud and then you have 8 new limbs. If you do that for the 4 vertical limbs I marked now you have 32 new limbs. Each of those limbs will produce fruit and the top of the bush will be full.

You will want to remove limbs going toward the center. Pinching those buds and making the plant bush out is really the key to getting a lot of fruit. It should also encourage the bush to put out new canes from the base. Don't let those get tall and branchless..pinch them when they get up 2 feet or so.

Use the same technique on the green lines on the left side. Just remember if it does not grow up prune it off.

BR,
Thanks, you're awesome! I'm going to save this whole post. Lots of great info :-)

Annette

Thanks BR. I though i had read something somewhere about cutting out big canes which is why I was going to attack that big one.

Papa Jim

Jim,

Yes there is renewal pruning but if the limbs are still producing well it is counter productive to remove them. You will know when it is time for it to go when you notice it is producing much less than the other canes.

This is a great thread; BR I'm not ashamed to say I've read probably 20 or so blueberry and pH threads you've contributed to over the past couple of days.

I think our alkaline water here (entire country sits on limestone and our water is from in ground auqifiers) was making a lot of my plants chlorotic and after watering with acidified water using vinegar last week (Temporary I know, don't worry I already bought the sulphuric acid and made a 3.3% stock solution) my peppers are already greening up more.

As it relates to this thread what I would like to know is if there are any blueberries that would fruit in a tropical climate? I don't know if they are like apples/cherries which "need" chill hours to fruit properly, but being that they're grown in Florida it leads me to believe I might be able to get away with growing maybe some type of SHB here? Advice appreciated.

(I attached a photo of the pepper so you could see how green they became after acidifying the water; they were a lighter green before and not responding much to being fertilized)

Even a previously stunted/warped pepper seedling is greening up tremendously after the acidified water application. Sorry if it's a bit irrelevant but just mentioning to say it worked for me so I think I could use it to keep my blueberries acidic were I to buy any.

Blueberries do need chill hours to flower and fruit. There are some that only require a short amount of chill hours, but they are still required. I think blueberries grown in Fl are mostly grown north of Orlando. Some are grown a little south of there, but it can be hit and miss on whether there are enough chill hours during the winter. Zone 10 Florida is out of luck. But then, they get to grow mangoes, so... I won't be crying for them.

The largest fields of blueberries I have seen so far is around Gainesville, which probably has something to do with UoF being in the area and always working on and testing new hybrids.

My two Sunshine Blues did so well last season (thanks to the advice I got here), I just bought three more and added a new section to my raised bed so I could plant them all in one patch. I alternated the Miracid with the Ammonium sulfate applications like BR suggested above. I never did the SA application because I watered them mostly with rainwater, however I will this year if I don't have enough rainwater to use.

One thing I didn't like about my set-up last year was I didn't like how the bird netting sat on the bushes because every time I moved the netting to pick some berries a few would pop off. To avoid this, I'm going to install some PVC frames to hold the netting up; I saw that idea on Pinterest.

For my planting mix, I mixed up pine fines with peat moss and perlite (7-3-1 ratio) to fill the bed. I only planted them last Saturday and they're already budding with new growth! I'm sure the 5+ inches of rain I got in the last couple of days helped :-)

New growth photo

Rain gauge. It overflowed, but you can see it was well past the 5-inch mark.

Hi!

I hope it's OK if I piggyback on this thread. I've read several posts about growing blueberries, but I'm a bit confused about when to fertilize, what fertilizer to use, when to use SA, etc. I would really appreciate some advice!

I got four blueberry bushes for Christmas: 2 Emeralds, 1 Spring High, and 1 Sweetcrisp. I have them in a container outside with a 50/50 mix of peat moss and pine bark fines. I got and planted them in early January.

I'm not sure when to fertilize or what brand/kind to use. I'm also not sure if I should be adding sulfuric acid (and when/how much). I water every other day them using tap water from a hose.

I would really appreciate any advice on the subject. Thanks in advance!

I have just purchased a blueberry bush in a 1 gallon container - if I put it in a 10 or 15 gal pot what soil / potting mix do I buy? I am a complete newbie at planting anything so don't even know what the fertilizer numbers mean . Will I be safe to just buy potting mix and fertilizer that says it is good for vegetables and flowers?

I have been reading and re-reading all these threads below but don't think I have ever seen pine fines at Lowe's (where I bought the plant) or Home Depot - should I go to a nursery for the right mix to po it in?

On the plant container it mentions cross-pollinating with another BB plant - it now has berries but will it need to be outside where bees - and birds, etc- can get to it? The guy at Lowe's said I just needed a Mexican Heather planted nearby and bees will find the BB plant instead of requiring two BB plants. Will it continue to produce without the pollinization?

I am so excited to be actually planting something and I love, love blueberries so I hope this will be a success and I don't kill it (the Plant and, my new-found interest in growing things).

Thanks for any help you can spare