We can grow northern highbush and lowbush blueberries and rabbiteye blueberries here in the Southern Appalachians as we live in a temperate band that extends west through Knoxville. Hardiness zones vary by variety, but in general northern highbush blueberries are hardy in zones 4-7 and rabbiteye blueberries grow in zones 7-9.

 

We recommend the northern highbush and lowbush for all areas in the mountains and rabbiteyes for elevations below 2500 feet in the mountains and the Piedmont. If you live in a place where you can grow both, here are some additional differences:

 

Some special blueberries:

Blueberry bushes usually begin bearing within 3 years of planting and mature within 6 years. They do well in full sun, but will tolerate part shade. All blueberries require acidic, moist, well-drained soils that have a high organic content. Always mulch plants well and maintain even moisture for best growth and production. Varieties vary with respect to cold hardiness and heat and drought tolerance. Blueberries will fruit between June and September, depending on variety and elevation. Plant two or more varieties for heavier fruit production and to extend your berry season.

 

 

 

 

 

Urine is actually a good fertilizer source for your plants. Think of it as our body’s own miracle grow. Urine contains adequate levels of nitrogen (12%), phosphorus (1-2%), and potassium (2.5-5%) for plant growth. Each person contains enough fertility to fertilize their own share of garden plants, as well as trees and shrubs.

 

It’s really important to NEVER DIRECT APPLY URINE TO PLANTS. I like to use diluted, aged urine at about 1 part urine to 8 parts water. Once mixed, apply it to the ground around where the roots are growing - out from the base of the plant.

 

For perennial or woody trees/shrubs, don’t start fertilizing until the plant is about one year old. Until then use an organic fertilizer. Waiting until the plant is established in this way reduces the risk of any burning.

 

Instructions:

 

Additional tips:

In general, you can use urine to water veggies, the lawn, or flowerbeds. Urine will activate a dormant compost pile better than anything else due to the high nitrogen content. Additionally, if you’ve got a lot of woodchips or sawdust, you can apply urine full strength right to a pile to age it quickly.

 

As a beginner, enjoy experimenting but err on the side of caution while you’re learning.

 

For a great website resource based on the book Liquid Gold, click here.

 

 

Both of them are good phosphorus sources as neither will burn your plants. In short, bone meal is ground up animal bones and rock phosphate or collodial phosphate is a mined mineral. Interestingly, world phosphate supplies will be the most limiting factor in growing plants and feeding people into the future as it is a limited resource, found only in a few places worldwide.

 

Phosphorous is extremely important for stimulating root growth and increasing hardiness and disease or stress resistance. For fruiting plants it helps stimulate flower bud production which translates to more fruit. If it’s missing, you might have an apple tree that never blooms.

 

In our area (the Western NC mountains) soils are often deficient in phosphorus as it is mostly leached from our soils.

 

Phosphorous is relatively slow to release and easily tied up in the soil. A good application should last 5-7 years and ideally you will build up a phosphorus reserve in your soil. The more acidic your soils, the more the phosphate is going to be available.

 

If you surface apply it will only move ¼ inch per year ithrough the soil so you want to be sure to mix a generous amount into the planting hole - a cup to a quart depending on the size plant.

 

For an already established plant, if you’re trying to raise the phosphate levels because it’s not flowering or growing well, you can go around with crow bar and make a ring of holes around the drip zone (outer edge of the vegetative growth) about 12” deep. Add half phosphate and half compost into the holes.

 

Don’t ever use bone meal, colloidal phosphate or any other calcium-containing fertilizer, including egg shells, on blueberries as it is too alkalizing and will cause iron chlorosis. And as always, make sure to get a soil sample before applying fertilizer so you know what to apply.

 

I’m not a plant fascist, insisting that we only grow pure, “native” gardens. Actually, plant nativity, just like human nativity, is relative.  Am I native because I’ve lived in WNC 26 years, or because I grew up here, or because my grandparents grew up here, or because I’m Cherokee, or because I’m an Iroquois, who anthropologists believe to be the mothers of Cherokee culture?  One of the conditions that makes our bioregion so diverse is that we host an intersection of a northward migration of southern organisms and a southward migration of northern organisms.  This drama is enacted over tens of thousands of years, so we get representatives from both directions and we have more overall species than our northern or southern neighbors. Since creatures move and colonize by themselves, who’s to say what native is?  What I mean when I say “native” is “naturalized”.  That is, I’m talking about species that will basically grow from one year to the next with very little help from us. 

 

So, I’m not interested in native food out of purism, but out of practicality and passion. Raising “annual” crops, those that require re-planting every year, is a constant uphill battle.  If you, in a fit of native cuisine envy, were to suddenly up and move to Italy without telling anybody, your precious veggie garden would rapidly revert to a combination of aggressive weedy plants and native forest.  We live in the great Eastern forest, which even after all the abuse would quickly retake our roads, fields, parks, and cities if we stopped clearing for a few decades.  Most of the European, middle-Eastern and Asian annual food plants we grow rely on constant soil amending and soil disturbance to emulate the alkaline, bottomland ecosystems that they hail from.  There are inherent soil processes  (the ethylene cycle) that guarantee that any agriculture relying on tilling will always require lots of work and “inputs”, an industrial agricultural term for petroleum-based biocides and fertilizer. Growing a bushel of industrial corn takes a half gallon of petroleum, a net energy loss.  What Michael Pollan calls “industrial organic” agriculture requires somewhat less oil, but still in the same ballpark, as the system relies on tractors and trucking instead of workers and farmers’ markets.  Once the generous delusion of the petroleum economy subsides, we won’t have the luxury of growing annual crops in this way. 

 

Entire civilizations have collapsed because they’ve deforested their land and depleted their soil, making it so that they could no longer grow food. Even hand-cultivated, organic versions of this process fight a losing battle, annually replacing leached minerals and maintaining loose sunny soil when all that this land wants to do is to be forest with a tight fungal mat weaving together four feet of acidic black topsoil.  Historically, unless they were a slave-holding people, our indigenous ancestors were always committed to minimizing work for their food, so they invented the forest and poly-culture techniques upon which ethno-botanist Bill Mollison based his system of permaculture design.  By working with natural cycles and patterns, permaculture helps us to work less while providing for our needs in a regenerative approach, meaning that what we leave behind when we die is nicer than what we found when we got here.  In conventional agriculture, we’re constantly trying to alkalinize our soils to meet the requests of these European crops, who weakly succumb to pests and diseases, drought and fungus, competition and lack of native microbial symbionts, providing us with plenty of work to do in raising a range of crops that don’t belong here to distract us from how boring our food habits are. 

 

It’s only in a land of recent immigrants like ours where we have to talk each other into eating locally grown food.  Elsewhere, even though industrialization has recently changed many things, the food legacies from pre-industrial living continue. 

All the food in a tradition tastes excellent in combination, it all digests well together; there’s a certain set of foods, usually entwined with the local ceremonial life, for each season.  Somehow these people living in the place they live, eating the food that grows near their homes in the right seasons, possess a mysterious vitality, even when a biochemical analysis of their diet says that they’re eating too much fat, or not enough vegetables, and that eating the chicken from their backyard is worse than eating soybeans from Illinois.  The highest goals of the local food movement-- ecological regeneration, human health, economic stability and cultural enrichment-- were truisms within pre-industrial traditional food systems.