How To Grow Blueberries
Many mornings as a child I can remember my dad making pancakes and dropping blueberries one by one with his purple stained fingertips into the batter that was flattening out on the hot skillet.
When I became a mother myself, my dad would keep little snack bags of blueberries in his freezer to tuck into the hands of my small children as we were getting ready to depart. Blueberries are a treasure of sensory memories in my family.
My dad was an optometrist, health enthusiast, and a naturalist. He often touted the benefits of the high antioxidant content in blueberries for eye health and many times he bought blueberry plants and tried to grow them with limited success. Instead he resolved to buy flats of Blueberries from local farm stands and he would freeze them for enjoyment and sharing all year.
During one of the worst smoke days of the wildfire season in 2017, my father lost his battle with cancer. He died peacefully at home. His last meal was vanilla ice cream with wild huckleberries. The Huckleberries had been lovingly picked by a family member, Michael, whom my dad had shown his favorite Huckleberry picking spots. Huckleberries are Oregon’s wild version of Blueberries and couldn’t have been a better choice for the last thing my native Oregonian father would taste earthside.
The last three years I’ve been determined to get good at growing blueberries in honor of my dad. I’ve had some good years and some bad years.
Many home gardeners find Blueberries a little challenging to grow successfully here in Southern Oregon, so I want to offer some information and tips that worked for me when I finally got abundant tasty Blueberries.
I asked a couple farmers in Southern Oregon what their experiences have been with Blueberries and this is what they said:
Don Tipping:
It’s about giving them the right conditions. They need the pH to be below five and really the only way to do that is to use sulfur. I've tried all the natural organic ways myself such as peat, wood chips and sawdust, and ultimately I use elemental sulfur now.
Matthew Molyneaux:
Starting with good sized plants is best. Don’t let them dry out in the summer.
Plant them on a mound with sawdust or shavings, not compost.
They need a low pH. Any variety works well, but pick 2 or 3 types for cross pollination. Choose an early and a late variety for a more continuous harvest. Duke and Liberty are popular choices.
With this helpful knowledge and a little more research from Oregon State University’s articles about Blueberries, I set out with determination to develop a relationship with this sentimental sweet blue food bearing wonder.
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