We’re Enjoying a Record Blueberry Harvest This Year

I’m absolutely delighted to report that it’s been a great year for our backyard blueberries. We have eight blueberry bushes of assorted varieties, growing in tubs of a suitably ericaceous soil / compost mix, some of which are getting on for twelve years old, some of which are newer, having been added to the collection in the past few years.

We’ve been picking from them for the past three weeks now, and so far have harvested around 2.5kg over the course of three or four pickings. Which might not sound like a massive amount, but given the small size and mass of your average blueberry, that’s really quite a few. And compared to past years, that’s easily ten times what we’ve usually managed to harvest.

What’s the secret of our success? Is it a uniquely acidic growing medium? A high-nutrient feeding regime? An automated irrigation system?

Nope, none of the above. Our great innovation this year has been… enviromesh.

You see, in past years we’ve left the blueberries uncovered, and the local blackbirds have had a field day, bouncing in and out of the bushes, grabbing the fruit at will, for as long as there was ripe fruit on the bushes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly happy to share a bit of our fruit with the local bird population, in principle at least. The problem is their obvious, and only natural, inability to reciprocate. An unprotected blueberry bush is an all-you-can-eat buffet for a blackbird, and they’re just not able to restrain themselves and letting us take our fair share. Which is why we reckon that in past years we’ve lost – based on this year’s harvest and a rough estimate of previous years’ gleanings – around 90% of the crop to voracious avians.

But not this year. I decided that I was going to put a stop to the blackbirds’ antics, and brought a couple of sections of enviromesh – very finely woven plastic sheeting – back from the allotment, which was pinned to the fence and draped over the bushes. And it has been hugely successful. I saw a blackbird try its luck only to bounce off the mesh a couple of times – completely harmlessly, it’s so fine there’s zero risk of a bird becoming entangled – and then give up and fly off to look for an easier-to-access food source. Speaking of which, it’s welcome to our Cornus mas berries when they ripen, we rarely do anything with those. And they did eat practically all our Amelanchier fruit earlier in the year. We do provide for nature elsewhere in our garden. But they can keep their greedy beaks off our blueberries from now on.

Having said that, it is getting near to the end of the cropping season now. Three weeks of dry weather have led to a lot of very small berries, even though I’ve been watering the bushes with collected rainwater every couple of days, and it’s getting to the stage where they’re maybe not worth the effort of picking, and there’s probably just over tenth or so of the year’s total harvest left anyway. At which point, I might just leave the covers off and let the birds have their fill. 90% for the humans, 10% for the birds seems to be the right way around to me.

How about you? Do you grow blueberries? Do you protect them from birds? Have you had a good harvest this year? Do let me know, via the comments.