Planting garden blueberries and features of care in a personal plot

The benefits of blueberries, as well as their taste, are difficult to overestimate, but few decide on long hikes in the forest and painstaking collection of small berries against the background of constantly stinging mosquitoes. An excellent solution is to plant garden blueberries on your own plot: caring for them is simple, and the harvest can be harvested no worse than from forest bushes.

General information and varieties

An attempt to transfer wild blueberries from the forest may well be crowned with success if in a new place it is possible to partially reproduce the composition of the forest soil. However, such experiments are carried out rather with the aim of decorating the site with original plants. To collect even a small harvest of such blueberries in your country house, you will have to plant a large area with bushes. It is easier to buy the so-called garden blueberries in the nursery. These are mostly tall blueberries, but some varieties are hybrids with wild blueberries. Bushes in many species reach a height of 1.5 m, their life expectancy is about 50 years. The berries are large, up to 7-8 kg can be harvested from one plant per season.

The root system of garden blueberries is more developed than that of forest ones, and the aboveground part is more spreading and stronger. The stems gradually lignify. Due to these characteristics, the plant is quite frost-resistant, less susceptible to attack by garden pests and disease.

In Russia, its own varieties of garden blueberries have not yet been bred, therefore, in nurseries you can mainly purchase the developments of agronomists of Canada and the USA. A favorite for planting in cooler climates is Bluecrop. It belongs to the mid-season, reaches 2 m in height. You can pick up to 9 kg of berries from a bush. It is grown quite successfully in the Urals, Siberia, and the Moscow region.

Universal varieties suitable for most regions of Russia also include:

• Top Hut (early maturing, undersized (30-40 cm tall) hybrid of blueberries and blueberries);
• Duke (early maturing);
• Bonus (mid-late);
• Bluehold (mid-season).

It is best to purchase garden blueberry seedlings that have reached the age of 2-3 years, grown in individual containers. As for the timing of planting, it is preferable to lay blueberries in the spring, in the second half of April. Autumn planting is carried out in early October, but unpredictable frosts, typical for most regions of Russia, can destroy fragile bushes.

Soil preparation

When choosing a place for a berry, it should be borne in mind that garden blueberries prefer sunny places or light partial shade. Excessive waterlogging, accumulation of rainwater is undesirable.

Just like wild blueberries, garden blueberries love acidified (pH 3.8-5) soils with a loose structure. Before planting blueberries, the soil must be acidified in one of the following ways:

• for a year, add 1 m² 20 g of ammonium sulfate, ammonium nitrate, 10 g of nitroammofoska, potassium sulfate;
• in a few days, shed the soil with an acidic solution: 1 tablespoon of citric or oxalic acid per 10 liters of water (you can take 100 ml of apple cider vinegar or 40 ml of electrolyte instead of acid).

To create optimal conditions for the development and fruiting of garden blueberries, the soil is prepared directly in the planting hole. Pits are dug at a distance of at least 1 m for low-growing varieties and about 2 m for tall ones. The diameter of the hole should be about 80 cm, depth - 60 cm. Peat chips (2: 1) are added to the soil selected from the hole. You can additionally add pine needles, rotten oak leaves, chopped bark, a handful of fertilizers for rhododendrons. The resulting substrate is mixed until smooth.

Heavy soil is made easier by adding river sand, and about 5 cm of drainage material is poured onto the bottom of the hole: broken brick, fine gravel, expanded clay. You should not bring manure, bird droppings, humus under the garden blueberries.

Advice

Some gardeners recommend adding hydrogel (dry concentrate, not decorative) to the substrate when planting blueberries. This substance prevents the leaching of fertilizers and the spread of fungal diseases, provides the roots of the plant with moisture for a long time. One bush will require only 10 g, diluted in 3 liters of water. The yield will increase by 1.5-2 times.

Landing technique

The prepared soil mixture is poured back into the hole about 2/3, then a blueberry bush is placed there. Some gardeners, when planting seedlings, removing them from containers, carefully straighten the roots, losing part of the earthy coma. It is believed that in this way the plant assimilates faster with the new soil. However, blueberry roots are hypersensitive to damage and therefore do not need to be touched. The lump is sprinkled on the sides with a substrate, which is slightly crushed in the process.

Planting blueberries should be done so that the bush is not in the lowlands, but on the ridge 30-40 cm high (heather grows this way better), the root collar does not deepen. After watering, the soil must be mulched with needles or crushed bark in a layer of 5-6 cm. For this purpose, forest litter from under the bushes of wild blueberries is well suited.

After planting, all shoots are pruned to 20 cm. Thus, the plant will be able to save energy for the development of the root system, and the growth of young fruitful branches will be stimulated.

Reproduction

If there is already an adult bush of garden blueberries on the site, then it is quite easy to get a whole plantation from it. The easiest way to reproduce is by cuttings. In the spring, before bud break, young twigs about 30 cm long are cut from the mother plant, their tips are dipped in a root formation stimulator, then they are buried 5 cm into a nutritious acidic and moist substrate. The cuttings must be covered with foil and protected from direct sunlight.

You can get one or two more from an adult bush of garden blueberries by separating part of the rhizome with branches using a sharp bayonet shovel. The procedure is carried out in the spring before the beginning of the growing season or in the fall after leaf fall.

The simplest way to propagate garden blueberries is by layering. For this, in summer, the strongest shoots from the lower tier are bent to the ground and fixed with brackets. With close contact with wet soil, the branch will soon begin to root.

Growing blueberries from seeds is rarely practiced, since this process is quite laborious, and as a result, the grown bushes may not inherit varietal characteristics.

Care

Garden blueberries are considered to be industrial berries, adapted to the growing conditions in the backyard. Bushes do not need special care if the soil quality is correct.

Top dressing

After a week, you can feed blueberry seedlings with nitrogen, phosphorus fertilizers and microelements (for spring planting). Additives are introduced in liquid form into the trunk circle. A раство teaspoon of colloidal sulfur is added to the fertilizer solution (per 10 liters) to neutralize the alkalization of the soil with nitrogen. Watering is carried out with warm water under the root and along the trunk circle in the evening. After about 2 weeks, the leaves will acquire turgor, new shoots will begin to grow.

The blueberry bush enters the full fruiting phase 3-4 years after planting. The feeding carried out every 2-3 years will help to ensure normal growth and development. Additives are added to the trunk circle (in the mulch) twice a year: in March-April and early June.

Apply the following tools.

• Aciplex is a complex fertilizer for marsh plants and conifers. Apply 30 g / m2 for young blueberries in spring², in autumn - 20 g / m²... For adult fruiting bushes 60 and 30 g / m2² respectively.
• Watering with acidified water (a tablespoon of oxalic or citric acid per 10 liters) is performed monthly during the growing season.
• Every 2-3 years, the top layer of mulch is added or changed.

Advice

You should not be zealous with fertilizers, since blueberries will respond with a powerful build-up of green mass to the detriment of fruiting.

Watering

The roots of garden blueberries are located at a depth of 15-30 cm. It is desirable that this layer of soil is always moist (but not flooded!). Watering is carried out depending on weather conditions. Often there is no need to moisten the soil as the thick mulch layer prevents evaporation. And if the hydrogel was mixed during planting, then 1 watering per month is enough, even in dry weather. However, it should be noted that this material will last no more than 2-3 years.

Advice

For the hydrogel to work longer, you need to water the blueberries 2-3 times a month, thus reducing material wear (the more moisture, the less load).

Pruning

The first sanitary pruning of blueberry bushes is carried out in early spring 3 years after planting. In the process, all dried and diseased branches are removed. On old lignified shoots, 5-6 buds are left, and the rest is pinched - so the berry will be larger. Branches that are more than 5 years old are cut off completely.

At the age of 15, the bush ceases to bear fruit abundantly, the berries become smaller, lose their juiciness and taste. During this period, a rejuvenation procedure is carried out: in the spring, all branches are cut almost to the root in order to stimulate the growth of young shoots. Only one central 20-25 cm long is left.

Disease protection

Garden blueberries suffer the most from fungal diseases. On the roots of wild specimens, several species of a permanently present potential pathogen were found. Basically, blueberries are affected by stem cancer, drying of the upper part of the shoots, gray rot, moniliosis.

The following drugs are used to fight infections:

• "Euparen";
• Benomil;
• "Kuprozan";
• Topsin-M.

Treatments should be carried out in the spring, before leafing out, and also in the fall - after picking the berries.

In the natural environment, blueberries are part of the diet of a large number of birds, this fact is also relevant for garden varieties. As the berries ripen (from about the end of June), the bushes must be protected with a special light net.

Garden blueberries are no more whimsical to care for than traditional currants or gooseberries, and in terms of yield they often surpass these shrubs. Berries of cultivated varieties are somewhat different in composition from wild ones, but they also contain a lot of elements and substances useful for the body.

The main thing for the successful cultivation of blueberries in the garden is to provide the bush with acidic loose soil with a composition as close as possible to forest conditions. Further care is quite simple: mulch will retain moisture, fungal diseases are not scary to the bushes in a sunny summer, frequent feeding is not required, shelter for the winter is not needed, and spring pruning takes very little time. Juicy and healthy berries from most varieties of garden blueberries can be harvested until the end of the season if you plant several varieties.