More blueberries!

Well, Did some reading on Duke blueberries and it is not self fertile, so I popped out to the local Lowes and picked up a decent sized Hardiblue blueberry which will cross pollinate with the Duke. Planted it about 6 feet from the other one, so we'll see how they do.

There is a definite lack of pollinating insects in this area even though there is a ton of scotch bonnet blooming now. Or the insects are all drawn to he Scotch bonnet and are ignoring the smaller plants like blueberries now. Not sure. I am going to look into getting some Orchard Mason Bees here.

Blueberries!!

I found someone selling 5 yr old blueberries on Craigslist. The seller has a friend in the East of WA who has a 'pick your own' farm and wanted to put in raspberries. So they were going to till an acre of 5 yr old blueberries. The seller grabbed 1800 plants, planted them for a bit, then was selling them for $25-45 depending on size.

I bought a $35 plant. It's a Duke blueberry and looking good, it has flowers already.

Blue, sweet stuff

I've never liked oatmeal, not as a kid, not as an adult, I've tried ways to make it palatable for years. Until Jamba Juice persuaded me into getting one of their oatmeal cups with berry compote for $1. I discovered I like it that way. But it's too expensive to eat daily from Jamba Juice. And I don't know if there are any up here.
So I did an experiment, I have a freezer with about a gallon of frozen blueberries. So I threw together my own blueberry compote. Ingredients: 2 cups of frozen blueberries, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 cup water. Boiled it for a few minutes, scraping a lot since I hate to burn stuff. Turned out good, not overly sweet, but adds that fruit taste to the oatmeal to make it edible.

New Jam

I've made a few batches of mixed berry jam using straw/blue/blackberries. The three berry flavor combo comes out great! I use Pomona Pectin with only 1 cup of sugar. This really lets the flavor of the berries come through.

You cam get Pomona Pectin here: Low Sugar Pectin, 1 oz. Box

Here's a picture of the berries being mushed:

First batch of fruit leather

My neighbor loaned/gave me an American Harvest Food Dehydrator they had laying about in a closet. So I started a batch of blueberry/strawberry fruit leather last night. 4 cups of blueberries, 1 cup of strawberries, 1/4 cup of my bees honey, and 1 tbsp of almond extract (which I spilled all over myself). I may have made it a little too thick. This is the recipe I used.

Started it around 10pm last night, when I left the house @ 7 am today it was still slightly gooey but smelled good. I asked my wife to check it around 10 and turn it off if it seems done. I'm curious how it will turn out. The puree tasted good last night. I remember my Mom making fruit leather when I was a kid and I enjoyed it back then (it also was a high value lunch time trade item).

Blueberry score!

Yesterday at lunch I went to a local farmers market. One booth was selling an entire flat of organic blueberries for $20. I grabbed it quickly. It had 14 lbs of berries! I've washed/frozen them all. Plan to make/try:
-blueberry jam
-blueberry wine/cyder
-dehydrate some
-make lots of muffins and pancakes

Picture of the blueberries

Mummy berries!

My 2 blueberry plants have lots of flowers on them, but also some of the leaves are turning red. Last summer they also turned red and the berries dried up, we thought it was because the plants were scorched by the sun during the hellish weeks we had.

We started researching red leaves on blueberries and it looks like the plants have 'Mummy Berry' disease. This is a fungus that infects the leaves and flower and the fruits. The leaves turn red and curl up, the flowers change and create a sweet syrup (that entices bees to spread the fungus) and the berries turn hard and look like pumpkins. When the berries dry up and fall off, the berries sit on the ground. When spring comes little fungus 'funnels' come up from the berries and spread the spores. And so the cycle continues.

This fungus can kill the plants, so we did some research and found that Serenade can help with this problem (http://www.serenadegarden.com/). I just sprayed the plants and hopefully they will start to get better before they die off.