Blueberry Pruning

The blueberries are pretty much done producing for the year. There are still some berries hanging from the branches, but so sparsely that it isn't a productive use of time to pick them. Keegan is ecstatic that the end of berry season is finally here. Have I mentioned that he really dislikes picking blueberries? Brad and I made it official today by pruning the bushes. I like doing it right at the end of berry season. It gives me the opportunity to see where the best producing areas are, where the thick overgrown areas are, and where the majority of scraggly dead growth is. It is much more difficult to tell during the fall/winter when there are no leaves. Also, the berries grow primarily on new growth so pruning while there is still plenty of time left before the end of growing season gives the bushes a chance to produce lots of new growth to replace what was pruned. Many people disagree with this and prefer to prune in the early spring, especially in areas that have harder winters. Having done it both ways, I prefer this timing for this area (zone 8B).

Every year it is almost painful for me to cut branches off of my beautiful bushes. Last year I pruned particularly heavily and I felt terrible about having done it for months. That is, until this spring when the bushes started blooming and I realized just how many berries I would have this year. The bushes were so heavy that I had to prop them up in many places. It was the best year we have ever had, with a close second being the year after we first moved here after I had to rescue the nearly dying and badly overgrown bushes from the advancing forest. Following suit, we pruned heavily again this year. We really needed to though. Despite thinking that the bushes had plenty of room a few years ago when we transplanted a few bushes, they have grown a great deal and are crowding each other out. The overhead trees have also grown a lot and are shading the bushes more than I had planned.

Blueberry bushes produce most berries on growth that is 2-3 years old and the least on growth that is more than 7 years. Each year I remove some of the oldest growth to allow more room for the newer canes to grow. Today we removed some of the biggest and oldest branches, which I had been putting off for years. Along with the old growth, some of the thicker growing and crowded areas were thinned a bit. It seemed like a ridiculous amount of branched piled up, but I think it was probably about the same amount as last year. Possibly a bit less in total but bigger branches. The bushes look so much happier already! They have so much more open space to allow sun in and more growth. We also completely removed the rose of sharon bush that was planted in the berry grove. I really hated to do it, but it was taking up prime blueberry real estate and negatively effecting the growth of the berry bushes. I console myself a bit with the fact that both of the little rose of sharon bushes I planted a couple of years ago have started really blooming this year, so they can act somewhat as a replacement for the big beautiful bush that we removed. A little blueberry bush was beginning to grow under some much taller bushes so we rehomed it. There wasn't enough sunny spaces left that would not be shaded out in the next couple of years to plant it near the rest of the bushes, so it now resides on the south side of the property near the chicken coop. Hopefully it will be happy there and will be joined in the future by any other volunteers we manage to transplant.

I lost count of how many gallons of blueberries we picked this year. I know that I froze at least 2 possibly 3 more gallons of berries since the last that I mentioned here. I will have to go back and look to see how many we froze before that. We need to make wine soon to clear the ones that weren't used up from last year out of the freezer. I also need to make more pepper jam now that the jalapenos have started producing. Hopefully next year we will have a good berry year too because of the work we did today. Oh how I love blueberries! I, like Keegan, am not sorry that picking season has come to an end, though. Now it is time to begin dreaming of next years harvest, and try to forget how itchy and sweaty the actual harvesting part really is.