Blueberry Patch – Then and Now

Our home farm on Harkins Slough was a dairy until the mid 1980s. When we arrived here in 2000 there were still quite a few remnants of the old dairy here. A classic old hay barn was in the last stages of collapse, and a 6-stall milking parlor still stood with all the plumbing, railings, and grates attendant to milking 6 cows at a time—sadly, we couldn’t save the hay barn, but we remodeled the milking parlor into a fine and very functional packing shed. On the Southeastern side of the property was another remnant of the land’s dairying days–an enormous concrete feedlot, over 150 feet long and cracked and buckled to the point of being unuseable for anything else. At the same site there were also the thick round slabs that grain silos used to sit on. It took a few years before we had the time and money, but in 2004 we bit the bullet and hired a demolition company to come in and remove them. All in all, they took away 60 semi drumptruckloads of concrete from these slabs and the old hay barn foundation. It felt good to be able to unpave the land and start farming these areas.For a few  years, we planted the upper portion of the newly uncovered farmland in various row crops. But in 2008, Steve was looking into starting a blueberry patch and realized that the land we reclaimed from the concrete was a prime candidate for blueberries. Blueberries need a soil that is highly acidic, and it is much easier to amend the pH of the sandy textured soils in that part of the farm then the heavy clays that we have in most other areas. This is a fairly sloped area of the farm, too, and we’ve been gradually planting most of the slopes into perennials to reduce tillage and resulting erosion.

Steve researched blueberry cultivation and went up to see a trial plot at the UCSC Farm, where they had tried a number of different varieties. Blueberries have only recently begun to be grown commercially in this area, but these new varieties of southern highbush blueberries were proving themselves to grow well in this climate. From what he saw Steve picked four varieties he liked – Southmoon, O’Neal, Misty, and Jewel–which are supposed to ripen sequentially so that we could stagger our harvest over a longer season than if we just had one variety.

To meet the very specific needs of blueberries, Steve prepared the beds a full year before we planted the berry plants. He added soil sulfur throughout the field, and then raised the beds and mulched them heavily with Redwood mulch. Once the pH of the soil was where he wanted it, he finally bought and planted the young blueberry bushes into the prepared ground in 2009. He laid two rows of sturdy drip tape along each row and set up an injection system to add vinegar to the water as needed to keep the pH in range. We harvested our first berries off the bushes in 2011 and 2012, after fending off the birds by carefully netting each row. We found that netting the individual rows made harvesting unnecessarily difficult and the birds inevitably got in and got stuck in the rows. So this year we netted the entire patch. The birds still get in, but it’s a little easier to help them find their way out again. This year we have a nicely productive berry patch on our hands and have enjoyed inviting you out to partake.

Then and Now: These two pictures were taken from the same spot on the farm. The one on the top is from 2004 just after we had the concrete slabs removed and freed up the ground for farming. You can see the milking parlor turned packing shed (building with white roof) and the house (brown roof to left and back). The picture on the bottom I took today from about the same spot. The riparian corridor we planted now blocks the view of the packing shed almost entirely with vegetation. The top corner of the blueberry field is in the foreground covered with bird netting. Some rows of beets, padron peppers, and fennel are visible beyond the berry patch.