Hi, Ed Laivo with Dave Wilson Nursery, welcome to my backyard.
Today we’re going to focus on blueberries; I showed you how to categorize blueberries. I’m going to show you after they’ve got a little bit bigger, what they actually look like and how much food they give you.
Its mid-June here in Modesto, California and we’ve been picking blueberries now for roughly about four weeks. This variety is a sharp blue, and its never green variety does very, very well in all climates. And the berry size is good, flavor is excellent and we’re, we even have some, different stages that the ripening of these berries is in. So I expect we’re going to see some berries off this plant for quite along while. And boy are they delicious. Cool variety, South Moon, probably the tastiest mid-season berries you can get. I’m growing these in sixteen to eighteen inch containers. This particular container is a sixteen-inch container. This plant is roughly about four years old in the sixteen-inch container.
We’ve been eating on this soft moon for two weeks now. I’ll show you a little bit about the volume we get off these berries, they’re wonderful. Holy clove! Look at these. This is Spartan, what a great size this blueberry has. At the grove a little bit of shape, a little burn on the later part of the summertime but boy if you can plant a Spartan, what a, what a beautiful plant, plant is in smaller pot, its actually in a ten inch pot, and this pot right here is probably just about ready for transplanting. This is a wonderful berry if you can find it. End of the season on sunshine blue here, sunshine blue, of course is never green and no losses of leaves during this winter time and it was very, very mild here and came back green. So it makes it a really, really great as well as of course, a great producer. We’ve been picking off of this plant now, probably for the last, best, better part of about three weeks.
Here’s one of the early varieties, a nice short O’Neal. Now O’Neal is one of the earlier plants where the earlier ripening fruit. That’s why you don’t see a lot of fruit on it. I’ve got this eighteen-inch container and the reason is can we get a good close up of that? See how gnarly and old this trunk is on this plant. This plant is going on eight years in this container, never been root pruned, never been anything but fertilized with good organic fertilizer to sustain the pH, and of course to keep this plant very, very, very healthy. I think I’ll do a lot of thinning out on the center this year, removing some of the major inner limbs but all in all, this, this plant has been very, very productive for many ears. Here’s one of my favorite varieties reveling. Now this is in a two gallon can of course and I’m growing the plant. I intend to shift this two gallon into a bigger pot like this, a ten gallon or a five gallon is fine too.
This fig is actually in a five-gallon can, so you can actually put this two into a five, or right directly into a ten, a ten-inch pot. Now this, on the other hand, this, this is an Elliot, this is one of the varieties of blueberries, it claims to have a wild blueberry flavor and this is ready, this has been in about two years in this ten inch pot. It’ll be ready to go into these larger eighteen, sixteen to eighteen inch pots where they can stay for many, many, many years. All right, you can put blueberries anywhere of course. I’ve got a little space here and a little space there so we plugged in three berries, this is an old Misty, and this, and this plant has been in this container for many years. Probably a better part of eight years and still doing very well, still producing some nice, new, sucker growth so that we’re going to have some place where new berries can form in the future and we really don’t have anything major. We’re going to take out of this plant, this season.
Misty is a very early season variety, this has been an unusually cool, fluctuating spring we’ve had. And so the berries on Misty seem to be hanging a little bit longer. Now on the other hand, this is an Ozark Blue and the Ozark Blue is one of the later varieties maybe close to the latest variety and this is a big healthy plant. Lots of new growth coming out so that we’ll have plenty of even nations for fruiting wood, but we’re still a little time away from, from being able to eat. Well, I don’t know, here we go let’s take a look. I like Ozark Blue, I think, for the end of the season, there’s probably no better, no better fruit. That’s right, it’s good. All right, this is a Jubilee right by the compost tumbler here, very narrow, upright plant. So this is a small area that we have but dang it, if we can’t fit a nice Jubilee in here, boy, Jubilee is a real, real special plant. Produces a lot of very nice size berries and again, what a wonderful thing, bowl of cereal in the morning, pick it right off of your Jubilee, going to sit down at the patio table, enjoy yourself a bowl of cereal, nutritious blue berries.
Well here we are, area roughly, ten by five. I’ve got nine varieties of blueberries all ripening at different times. What a great addition to any yard. These are blueberries that were freezing and putting away for the other times during the season. We’ve already made blue berry pancakes, blue berry plant sources, and blue berry dishes and enjoy those fresh as well as of course having blue berries with cereal in the morning; it’s always a special treat. And just being out here and working in the garden and picking blue berries is about one of the best things that you can look forward to in the garden at this time of the year. So to blue berries. They’re good for you.
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