I’m new to gardening and fruit trees.
I planted some rabbiteye blueberries (Premier and Tifblue) back in late May/ early June and 3 of them, I think the Premier, are getting reddish leaves. I’m thinking it’s some kind of fungus but i don’t know what to use to heal and protect the trees. Any help is appreciated!
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Did you have a long heat/drought period?
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Yes. I live in East Tennessee. I think it was about 6-8 weeks with no rain.
Your plants show nitrogen depletion and lack of water as well as a couple of fungal diseases. Address the nitrogen problem first and start watering every 3 days to bring them back in shape for winter. I use a couple of shovels full of chicken manure around my blueberries as it provides much needed organic matter as well as macronutrients. Be careful with watering, blueberries are easily over-watered.
While it looks bad, the leaf diseases are not as concerning. Your plants have anthracnose and septoria also possible some powdery mildew.
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How’s your soil ph? I have alkaline soil and blueberries like acidic soil around 5.0 ph.
I had to put them in pots with acidic soil because they were dying in the ground
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I have no experience with rabbiteyes but highbush blueberries can be sluggish growers that are difficult to return to vigor once they’ve been stunted IME.
The literature mostly highlights their need for an acidic soil but when establishing they suffer a great deal from periods of drought as has been mentioned, but even more commonly from poor drainage.
Here there is a type that flourishes in marshland, but somehow they create hillocks that drain well but provide constant water access. In commercial production they are often grown in raised rows to achieve a similar affect.
Commonly, the native blueberries here flourish in soils high in organic matter and that are relatively light. I’ve had trouble growing them in clay loam soils where most other plants flourish.
If you have trouble with your native soil you can probably have flourishing plants by growing them in a 50-50 sand and peat moss mixture fertilized with a balanced slow release product like Osmocote or perhaps compost tea, amongst a lot of other nutritional options with ammonium as the N source. Apparently they are adverse to nitrate. They also don’t like competition from grasses or other weeds so it’s best to keep them mulched with something like wood chips or pine needles and remove nearby weeds.
Well water and municipal water is often excessively alkaline so you need to test it and acidify it if this is the case. An option is to capture rain water from your roof.
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Thank you all for the feedback and sorry it took long for me to respond. I have checked the soil Ph, it’s 5.4, so I think it should be OK. I’ve added some coffee grounds around the base of the plants to increase the nitrogen. I’ve just started a compost pile so that won’t be ready for a while. We have ducks and I’ve been using their “poop water” from a kiddie pool to water the blueberry trees.
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Most growers fertilize lightly after harvest. Some type of fertilizer for acid loving plants would be perfect. Holy Tone for Acid plants works great but its hard to get the smell off your gloves and hands. We use a light dose of Ammonium Sulfate after harvest on our 2 acres of PYO Blueberries… We have found that Rabbiteye Blueberries are easy to grow in certain areas like where I live . I would not worry about the way the leaves look now but good drainage is critical and the plants may need to be raised 6 inches or so. They are normally planted on some type of raised beds or bedded rows. It’s easy to determine the areas with poor drainage in a big field by how well the plants grow. Water is important especially on young plants. We water our plants when we don’t get regular rainfall.
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I give my blueberries diluted urine about now. The only other thing I need to push a bit are my late tomatoes. Where I need N on small orchard trees I’m trying to get bigger, I will give them some in Sept for them to draw into their buds for spring growth. Peaches here tend to stop growing in Sept.
Do you use a slow release N source or a shot of something like diluted urea in water?
People have mentioned the nitrogen problem but I would be cautious to not over fertilize blueberries. I would use a fish emulsion based fertilizer and increase the water to them. I have killed a blueberry bush with over-fertilization early into my growing experience. They like to be mostly left alone in my experience. I think the drought is mostly responsible, some good rainwater and light fish emulsion should improve things slowly. However they will not likely burst with growth this year now.
If you are asking me, my plants are mature so I just give them pure urine that I store up in a plastic gas container before a predicted rain. For other annual plants I dilute it a lot.
I haven’t used anything other than the duck poop water. Still learning about what they need. They are on the other end of my property from the ducks so I was filling my tractor bucket with the water from their pool and driving out over and dumping it on the trees. Yes, on the trees. Lesson learned. Water the base 
Could be some of my problem.
Slow release nitrogen. Put one at the base of each tree?