The blueberry growing season is going to start any minute as soon as it stops snowing! Last week, Bill and I decided we needed more growing information before life gets really crazy, so we loaded up the Walnut (our Rav4 Toyota) and took a road trip to Oregon.
First stop was Yacolt, Washington to visit with John, Julie, Dean and Sandy. Here they all are with Grandma. This picture was taken up lake at a different time. We had fabulous happy hours and dinners both nights. Saturday after breakfast, John gave us a personal tour of his and Dean's property which included the creek, pet cemetery, pond, next tree to be logged and Dean's cool barn. We can imagine it would be ultimate fun to picnick there in the summer. If we didn't have cherries to harvest, we'd be in Yacolt on the 4th of July with our inner tubes!
In Portland Oregon, we ate lunch here.We couldn't help it because it looked so healthy. We looked for retired young people as described in the show Portlandia. We think we saw them and lots of Prius'. Overall, we felt like it was a very green place that we farmers couldn't help but like.
Then we arrived at, ta da, the Oregon coast! The day we arrived we had sunshine all day!
It was beautiful and warm, so it was no big surprise when we saw lovers in the sand. They're hard to see, but they're there. I was hoping to see wildlife but these two were all we saw.
Oh ya, blueberries. We met Dick Mombell at Fall Creek Nursery in Lowell Oregon. We talked in the office while it hailed outside. Dick reviewed our soil and leaf analysis reports from last fall and told us he thought it all looked good. He suggested we plan on 2 hives of bees per acre this spring.
This is a row of Draper blueberry bushes. Dick didn't think we would need to trellis our 4 year old plants this summer. Fall Creek doesn't trellis, and they're bushes do just fine.
The scientist working at Fall Creek told us if we can find a way to store our Liberty blueberries until October, they would be worth a lot of money. We will have to get the information on how to do this from a university since packer/shippers don't share that kind of valuable information.
The fruit buds on these blueberries are more progressed than ours. Therefore they are easier to see, so we got some excellent pruning advice. Both Liberty and Draper renew wood from the crown. The objective is to prune back to new wood and keep the plant growing up. We should expect 5-6' tall plants at maturity.
This limb tip was pruned off because it had a lot of brushy twiggy growth. The basics are:
- Remove low growth
- Remove brushy, twiggy or diseased wood - prune off all grey wood
- Thin out fruiting buds
- Shape the bush
Gloved hands can do a lot of this work quicker than pruning shears.
Leave 6-9 canes per bush. Don't leave wood on the bush that produced berries last year. That wood won't produce berries two times. The lateral branches produce fruit. Prune to get lateral branching. On a big vigorous cane, tip it to push lateral branches or forking. You don't want a single vigorous cane.
The next morning we met with OSU researcher, David Bryla who gave us the advice not to hang the drip line above on a trellis because it won't provide enough water. The water will run off the landscape cloth and off of the berm. Yikes, that was a golden gem of info! Since we've had a few incidences in the summer with voles chewing up the drip line under the landscape cloth, we were planning to hang the drip line above. OK, so back to the original plan and we'll just need to keep after the voles and stay vigilant about the irrigation.
Notice the research farm has a trellis? None of the private farms or commercial growers that we saw used them. We're guessing the research farm has a bigger budget.
After our excellent meeting with David, we floored it to Chelan. It was another beautiful day, and Mount Rainier looked splendid if not a little blurry from the speed of the Walnut heading home.
No comments:
Post a Comment