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With the recent explosion in the popularity of blueberries, some specialist nurseries, including ourselves, are now able to offer an ever increasing range of blueberries and other Vaccinium for home gardeners. We may be biased, but having grown and supplied blueberry plants for over 50 years now, we are confident that we will supply you with well grown blueberry plants by mail order
The main varieties of Vaccinium plants can be grouped into
- Northern Highbush Blueberry
- Southern Highbush Blueberry
- Half High Blueberry
- Cranberries and Lingonberries
- Vaccinium species
Choosing Blueberries-
Blueberries come in all different shapes, sizes, soil tolerances, vigour and flavour.
Although blueberries are generally supposed to be self fertile, we find customers with a single plant often come back to buy another because they get lots of flowers, but low fertilisation to produce fruit. We advise against having only 1 variety as the best pollination is done between more than one. Make sure your supplier provides plants whose flowering period overlaps.
Varieties Recommended for the United Kingdom and similar climates
Size and Shape of Plant
Our advice is to choose plants which are at least 30cm high for most of the highbush varieties and are showing good vigour. A good quality producer will pot a rooted cutting, allow it to grow and as fresh shoots are produced, pinch the tips out at least twice a year. This encourages bushiness, which in turn gives more fruiting wood quickly. If a plant looks small and spindly, it tends to indicate that you'll be waiting a long time for any fruit.
A good age to buy plants is between 2 and 3 years, in a 2 litre pot. Buying younger plants may mean that the shock of leaving their nice comfy pot and having to get their immature roots into your soil may be too much for them.
Choose a Healthy Plant.
Sometimes this is not easy to tell. If you buy during the growing season, make sure the leaves are green and the plant looks generally healthy. Watch out for black spotting on the leaves, yellow chlorosis (veining) in the leaves and lack of vigour. If the plant is entering dormancy, expect to see yellow / orange leaves, sometimes with the black spotting described above. At this stage in the cycle, this is normal. Take the plant out of its pot and check that the plant is not pot bound.
If you're buying when the plant is dormant, look at the buds. A lack of fruiting buds (the large ones) or more importantly leaf buds (smaller) could indicate a problem in a previous year. Check that the wood is fresh and not too twiggy. Many gardeners whose plants arrive during the autumn worry about leaves being yellow and spotty on the lower branches. This is totally normal and should accompany birght red foliage on top. Basically these leaves are soon to drop off.
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