Blueberry Help

Half of my back yard used to be wild blueberries. We’ve had older people tell us about going blueberry picking there when they were younger. I’ve been picking blueberries there since we’ve moved in, but each year it seems to get worse. The patch, which I would assume used to be half an acre, is now nothing more than a few square feet. This year, I was lucky to pick a small handful of berries. We had a very late, heavy frost in June, that may have killed a lot of the blossoms and we’ve had very little rain this year.

The summer we bought the land, we mentioned about cutting them down and burning them. And we’ve mentioned it every summer thereafter, for the last 8 years. This year, as you may see in a previous post, I wanted the bushes near the chicken coop cut down so I could go in and clean out the garbage the previous owners threw there, concerned about my birds getting injured during freeranging. That prompted my husband to basically start whacking everything. He cleared out a lot by the coop. Then he went to the woods near the old Apple tree. He even has his little backhoe down there to try and remove the roots and stumps of the alders. Which brought him to decide it was finally time to do the blueberries. Initially we thought we’d just do half of it, then we’d still have some for next year. So half of it is done, and it looks amazing!

I had him cut around the few trees that were there. Here is a little oak and a little maple that I’m hoping will now grow. We still may cut the other half of the patch out, as we really don’t think we’ll get much out of it anyway. We’ll see how it goes. There probably won’t be any burning, as it’s been very dry this year. Here’s the other half of the patch, so you can see some of what had to be cut.