BLUEBERRIES SEASON BY SEASON

Take a walk through the blueberry year with lots of tips and advice from our regular fruit expert David Patch

- David Patch

Gardening – like much of life in general – is about the art of compromise. Given unlimited space, time and money we would be thrilled to have extensive top fruit rchards, cages filled with soft fruit and olytunnels or greenhouses bursting with ender exotica. The limits reality places on us ean that, in practice, hard choices have to be ade. If there’s only space for one tree in the arden, should it be apple, pear or plum? Or erhaps a damson or quince? Well, this month et’s look at a fruit that should be high up on veryone’s list of fruit to grow – blueberries. ardy, relatively easy to look after, suited to ot culture and with fruit that is delicious, acked full of healthy nutrients and only enerally available as expensive imported fruit on supermarket shelves, growing blueberries proves that, just occasionally, you can have everything you want.

SPRING

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail! Although the first luscious dark purple fruit are still some months away, there are two key jobs to tackle in early spring to give you the very best chance of a successful harvest – feeding and mulching. If you are growing blueberries, whether in the soil or in pots, you need to feed them. Blueberries have quite delicate and surprisingly inefficient root systems – in the wild they are used to a constant supply of rotting leaves and other vegetation, which builds up into thick layers over the years, decomposing gradually and providing a steady supply of nutrients and minerals. In our more sterile, manicured fruit gardens, we need to provide these nutrients by careful use of fertilisers at appropriate times of the year.