Last fall I bought two new blueberry plants.
We originally bought 4 around 2018 but after the great heatwave of 2021 one of them gave up the ghost.
The ones I have aren’t super productive and the birds and I think the squirrels, too, get into them.
When I was reading about blueberry plant care, the articles said that the first year you shouldn’t let them flower and make blueberries and instead let the plant get established. Since I did not know that for the first 4 plants, I wanted to do that for the new ones.
But what does that mean? Do you clip the flowers back? Pinch them?
I asked at the nursery and they told me it was fine to let them flower but if I wanted I could just pull them off. (Actually, every person I have mentioned this to told me it was fine to leave the blooms on.) The new plants are very small and don’t have a lot of flowers and I haven’t decided yet.
For the first time I also pruned the older plants, but not very much. I didn’t realize it took blueberries a while to get established. I thought I would be buried in blueberries so I could freeze some and make jam and we would just have giant bowls full of berries everywhere. Photos of blueberries when I have them.