Richard. Is the lot next door to you for sale? I’m moving to California. Seems you guys can grow ANYthing - and it thrives! I’m so jealous! I have had so many different varieties of Blueberries, here in 7B. Chandler. Toro. Reka. O’Neal. Blue this - Blue that. Coddled them. Let them ‘rip’. Tried all sorts of things . . . and they just seem to kind of struggle along. Sigh.
I know someone who is one of those people that says things, casually, like, "Oh, we have great blueberry bushes! We put them in awhile ago . . . never prune or do anything to them - they are huge, now, and we get TONS of berries. " Maybe I’m paying too much attention to them?
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I have two O’Neals and two Monrovia Sunshine Blues in the same raised bed. The latter are growing well but the O’Neals have lackluster growth – although strangely covered in flower buds at the moment. A colleague of mine a few miles south in Encinitas has them in pots and they perform beautifully. 
Yeah. OK . . . but what about that lot? 
I think I’ll give the O’Neals one more summer - and then replace them with another variety, if they don’t come through! Thanks, Richard.
There’s one for sale down the street.
Lately we’ve been harvesting about 20 a day 
The 1/4 acre home 3 doors down the street just sold for $475k.
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Today’s harvest
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Richard
Those Dosatron injectors are some nice stuff.
Does each injector feed a separate growing space with specific needs like PH and nutrients?
Yes. There’s three separate automated networks of fertigation pipes. One goes to the tuber bed and adjacent artichoke planter. The second goes to plants with serious acid requirements in both the front and rear of the house. The third goes to everything else: fruiting plants, herbs, and butterfly/hummingbird gardens – the latter being a matter of convenience because they are within the realm of the “fruit” network. I also have a 4th non-fertigated network which tops off the water in our 3 bird fountains twice a day.
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Look at that fruit set!
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WOW! Mine struggle along. And Mr. Mockingbird sees to the ‘few at a time’ that I harvest! I try to beat him out there in the A.M. - but he is an Early Bird.
Good luck. The early bird gets the blueberries. I think is how it goes.
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Today I picked a quart of blueberries from our two Monrovia Sunshine Blue plants. There’s about an equal amount remaining on the plants that might ripen in a few weeks.
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Winter foliage of O’Neal (left) vs Monrovia Sunshine Blue. White tips on leaves are from pesticide surfactant in Voliam Flexi. Pots contain fig cultivars.
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Yes, one negative for Sunshine Blue in the landscape is no fall color. But the blooms are pink, and leaves are rather blue all summer. Takes after the Rabbiteye parent on that account I think.
It’s a 3 foot plant, spreads some by roots. Berries about ‘average’.
… in your climate. Unpruned here they are 12’.
These two dormant O’Neal blueberries arrived from One Green World today. I will use 1 to replace a failing black current adjacent to the blueberries. The other will probably end up in a community garden.
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