Traken
Shohin
I was at Home Depot with the wife to grab some mulch, and as is the norm, I have to pick through the trees. They had a batch of highbush blueberries, and while I like blueberries, I wasn't considering one given they were all buckets with a handful of twigs poking out of them, until I saw this one.
EDIT: Sorry for the lousy pics.
It's got a heck of a chunky trunk on it. The big part has to be at least 4 inches across, and if I were to dig under the soil to reveal where it connects to the other trunk, it might be over 6 inches total. Not sure, but it's pretty hefty. I got rid of the handful of suckers, but haven't touched it otherwise.
@Leo in N E Illinois, if I might pick your brain a little, being the lord of blueberries, when would you recommend doing major work? I'd normally consider fall pruning, but you'd mentioned that the flower buds are created in July, so would I be better off treating it like an azalea in that regard and doing the hard prune a couple weeks after flowering? I definitely want to do whatever will help facilitate backbudding, even if that does include abandoning the flowers for a year and pruning in the fall.
I know you've said the duke variety is very sensitive to calcium. I've got some acidic fertilizer with no calcium in it, so that should work fairly well. I think it's actually labelled blueberry fertilizer, though I've been using it for the azaleas until now.
EDIT: Sorry for the lousy pics.
It's got a heck of a chunky trunk on it. The big part has to be at least 4 inches across, and if I were to dig under the soil to reveal where it connects to the other trunk, it might be over 6 inches total. Not sure, but it's pretty hefty. I got rid of the handful of suckers, but haven't touched it otherwise.
@Leo in N E Illinois, if I might pick your brain a little, being the lord of blueberries, when would you recommend doing major work? I'd normally consider fall pruning, but you'd mentioned that the flower buds are created in July, so would I be better off treating it like an azalea in that regard and doing the hard prune a couple weeks after flowering? I definitely want to do whatever will help facilitate backbudding, even if that does include abandoning the flowers for a year and pruning in the fall.
I know you've said the duke variety is very sensitive to calcium. I've got some acidic fertilizer with no calcium in it, so that should work fairly well. I think it's actually labelled blueberry fertilizer, though I've been using it for the azaleas until now.
