Our Blueberry Patch

Our home farm on Harkins Slough was a dairy farm until the mid 1980s. When we arrived here in 2000 there were still quite a few remnants of the old dairy here. A classic old hay barn was in the last stages of collapse, and a 6-stall milking parlor still stood with all the plumbing, railings, and grates attendant to milking 6 cows at a time—sadly, we couldn’t save the hay barn, but we remodeled the milking parlor into a fine and very functional packing shed.

On the Southeastern side of the property was another remnant of the land’s dairying days–an enormous concrete feedlot, over 150 feet long and cracked and buckled to the point of being unusable for anything else. There were also massive round slabs that grain silos used to sit on. In 2004 we bit the bullet and hired a demolition company to come in and remove them. In all, they took away 60 semi drumptruckloads of concrete from these slabs and the old hay barn foundation.

It felt good to be able to unpave the land and start farming these areas. For a few years, we planted the upper portion of the newly uncovered farmland in various row crops. But in 2008, Steve was looking into starting a blueberry patch and realized that the land we reclaimed from the concrete was a prime candidate for blueberries. Blueberries need a soil that is highly acidic, and it is much easier to amend the pH of the sandy textured soils in that part of the farm then the heavy clays that we have in most other areas. This is a fairly sloped area of the farm, too, and we’d been gradually planting most of the slopes into perennials to reduce tillage and resulting erosion.

Blueberries have only recently begun to be grown commercially in this area, but these new varieties of southern highbush blueberries were proving themselves to grow well in this climate. Steve visited a trial plot at the UCSC Farm, where they had tried a number of different varieties. From what he saw he picked four varieties – Southmoon, O’Neal, Misty, and Jewel. The idea was that the different varieties would ripen sequentially so that we could stagger our harvest over a longer season than if we just had one variety.

To meet the very specific needs of blueberries, Steve prepared the beds a full year before we planted the berry plants. He added soil sulfur throughout the field, and then raised the beds and mulched them heavily with redwood mulch. After that he let it sit. Once the pH of the soil was where he wanted it, he finally planted the young blueberry bushes into the prepared ground in 2009. He laid two rows of sturdy drip tape along each row and set up an injection system to add vinegar to the water as needed to keep the pH in range. We harvested our first berries off the bushes in 2011, after fending off the birds by carefully netting each row (picture on left). This proved to be inefficient–we found that netting the individual rows made harvesting unnecessarily difficult and the birds inevitably got in and got stuck in the rows. So starting last year we net the entire patch (picture on right). The birds still occasionally get in, but it’s a little easier to help them find their way out again, and harvesting is much easier. We got the netting up a few weeks ago for this season, and will leave it up until the fruiting is done for the year.

This season is starting out very good for the blueberries. The bushes are loaded with berries much earlier than last year. We’re hoping the season continues through mid summer and they don’t blow themselves out with this first spectacular flush of fruit!