Seventeen years ago I decided to grow blueberries. Several hundred large shrubs were obtained and successfully transplanted.
In order to send all the strength possible into the root system, the plants were cut to six-inch stubs. The first year’s growth was excellent, each bush recovering about half the normal size. For the second year, it was good cultural practice to remove all the flower buds and, if you realize how many buds there are on one blueberry, you can easily understand that it took me over two weeks to complete the disbudding.
The third season was the year of great expectancy. The shrubs had regained their original size. The blossoming was beautiful and prolific. By midsummer, the branches were so laden with fruit that they literally touched the ground.
An interested county agent and I estimated that we would have at least 500 quarts of juicy, luscious. saleable berries. But do you know how many we actually did get? Less than three quartsÑmostly unripened ones. bird rejects and dried runts. It seemed that every “flying vacuum cleaner” in Bergen County had a visa to the Runk blueberry patch. And that included birds who normally are not considered fruit eaters at this season. Among them were the red-eyed vireos, chickadees, flycatchers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, orioles, swallows, woodpeckers, native sparrows and others.
The red-eyed vireo occurs wherever trees grow. It nests low but belongs essentially to the forest canopy far overhead. Undoubtedly, it was once the most abundant bird in North America. It may still enjoy this distinction despite the fact that vast areas that were once good red-eye habitat have been cleared and are now occupied by birds requiring more open types of country.
The red-eyed vireo is pre-eminently famous as a singer. He is incessant in his song and particularly vocal during the heat of our long summer days when few other birds sing.
The nest of the red-eye is the commonest one encountered in the woods. A small cup-shaped structure about the size of one’s fist, it is always slung between two twigs of a fork and situated from 5 to 20 feet from the ground. The nest is a beautifully finished piece of workmanship, constructed of fine grasses and rootlets, bits of birch bark and paper from wasps’ nests, bound together and to the supporting branches with spider’s or caterpillar’s webbing and flexible strands of grapevine bark.
The vireo’s summer food is insects but after the breeding season it relishes a great variety of small fruit, particularly the blueberry.
There is some sort of blueberry adaptable to almost every section of the continent. The most important and widely usable one for landscape use is the highbush blueberry, Vaccinitim corymbosum. It is a deciduous shrub reaching 12 feet in height but in gardens can easily be kept lower by proper pruning. The foliage turns a bright scarlet in the autumn. sometimes even orange.
Blueberries fail in alkaline and neutral soils, such as those of ordinary vegetable gardens. The ideal medium for them is a mixture of peat and sand, well drained and aerated but with an ample supply of water during the growing season. Cultural practices are similar to those of the rhododendron.
Many varieties of blueberries are now available at the local nurseries and fruit growers. They differ chiefly in habits of growth, maturity dates of fruit and diversity of twig coloring for winter effect. As they are long-lived plants (50 to 75 years), a little extra care in their selection is worth-while.
