Room to grow: It’s time to transplant our berries
More than one person has asked: “Why don’t you put your plants in the ground?”
Under the right conditions, that would be ideal.
There are a number of factors that have made it easier to keep our plants in 5-gallon containers, at least until now.
The most important factor has been the level of control the bags give us to keep the acid-loving plants healthy in an otherwise hostile environment.
The heavy alkaline clays in this area make it extremely difficult to grow these plants in the ground without significant amendments and controls. Irrigation water drawn from the nearby watershed also registers high in alkalinity.
Treatment is required to bring the ph level in the soil and water down. We tested the water once at 8.0, which is closer to the top of the scale for alkalinity. Blueberries thrive in soil that registers between 4.0 to 5.0, in the acidic range.
By keeping them in bags, and treating them with N-phuric to bring the alkalinity in the irrigation water down, our plants seem to thrive; they can more easily take up nutrients when the ph level is properly adjusted this way.
This is just one reason growers complain that blueberries are “high-maintenance” plants, and may also explain why they can be so expensive in the market.
I know one farmer in the area who has essentially given up on his blueberries after nearly 12 years of growing in the soil because, “it’s just too damned hard to grow them here.”
At least in the ground, they are. It’s a little easier to grow them in containers. Still, as the grower who gave up his field also said, “Blueberries are one of the most demanding crops to grow, no matter what.”
They are demanding but they are also supremely responsive to good care. They’re not like citrus crops, which can be handled with a little less care, it seems.
Once, while I was pruning a line of blueberry plants, carefully trimming away the dead and excess growth, Farmer Jim, the citrus grower, stopped by and said: “You don’t have to make them look pretty!”
“I’m not trying to make them look pretty,” I said. “They need this. It’s good for them.”
The bags were supposed to last 3-5 years. We’ve entered into our third full season with the bags, which have begun to disintegrate, tearing at the slightest touch, and basically just coming apart.
I’ve patched dozens of them with duct tape, which worked OK in the beginning. Now, it’s a fruitless task. It’s time to transplant our little container farm of 1,500 blueberries into larger containers.
We probably should have started transplanting one year ago, when some plants—about 300-400 of them—began to show signs of stress. The leaves on these plants never quite turned green, bearing signs of disease or mineral deficiency, and the fruit didn’t ripen to a full flavor.
They still produced but not as well as the other plants in the field.
Finally, out of curiosity, I began to pull random plants off the line, removing the bags and looking at the roots. Clearly, they had become root-bound and needed releasing.
We talked about what to do early last summer—should we put them in the ground, or into larger containers?—but we were in the middle of our harvest and all our time and attention went into that.
“After we’re done with the harvest, and the plants start to go dormant, we’ll begin transplanting.” That was our plan—until we got consumed with pruning the entire field, something that we had never done. It took weeks, and now finally we can address transplanting.
For now, we’ll keep them in containers. It appears at this stage to be the best way to do this, at least until we can find a suitable field. Healthy blueberry plants of these varieties are supposed to live between 10 and 20 years in the soil and grow up to 10 feet.
We’ve purchased 400 used, heavy duty, 15-gallon containers that will hopefully provide enough new room for the distressed plants to recover. Eventually, we’ll transplant the whole field.
The sickly plants worry me more than Zsu Zsi, who says that as soon as we get them into their new homes, they’ll spring back to life. “They are like weeds,” she says.
In some sense that’s true, but for them to have any chance we’ll need to do a really good job of trimming the roots and branches, and finding the right soil mix that will provide them with the most ideal growing conditions, before they can be transplanted.
Our initial planting medium, a mix that we came up with on our own, although not ideal, worked beautifully up to this point. The plants, removed from their 1-gallon nursery containers and into their current homes, took off. Now, they need a new home.
This time around, however, I want the soil mix to be the best we can make it. An ideal growing medium, by most accounts, will have 20-40 percent organic material such as peat moss or shredded coconut husks, which we didn’t have last time.
We’re in the midst of experimenting with new mixes that we hope will be economic and work well enough to give our plants the best shot at growing to full maturity. Soon, we’ll be pouring close to 30 cubic yards of the stuff into these 400 containers, giving our fruiting shrubs some room to grow. §
