How to Make Blueberry Soil

blueberries are native to north america but they're not native to my part of colorado which means if i want to grow them i need to make the conditions right specifically the soil ph join me today as i show you how i prepare my potting soil for growing blueberries in pots [Music] hi i'm gardner scott and one of the very first things i did when i moved to this new house a couple years ago was to get a soil test done and i found out that my native soil has a ph of 7.0 that's neutral great for growing most of the plants that i want to grow in my garden but that also means it's terrible for growing blueberries i just won't be able to grow blueberries in the ground but i can grow blueberries in a pot because i can make the soil that goes into these pots blueberries like acidic soil around 5.0 if you have a range of ph between 4.5 and 5.5 then you can grow blueberries in the ground for me i need to create soil with those acidic conditions to be able to do blueberries and i want to do blueberries i already have gooseberries and honey berries and currants and strawberries and raspberries why not add blueberries to the list the rest i can grow in my native soil but the blueberries i have to work to make it happen when you grow blueberries you should grow at least two different varieties to get the best fruit so i'll be putting a different variety in each of these two pots i could mix up the potting soil in the pots but i think it'll be easier for me and also easier to show you by mixing it in a wheelbarrow and then moving this soil into the pot what i'm focusing on is trying to get a mix with a low ph an acidic potting soil you might be able to buy an acidic potting soil but it's not common in my area which is why i need to make it in choosing the ingredients i'm focusing on those acidic ingredients that can bring the ph down the primary being sphagnum peat moss now this is an important aspect when making the mix there are a number of different peat mosses you might find but believe it or not most peat moss is closer to a neutral ph than you might suspect but the sphagnum peat moss is quite acidic pretty close to a 3.5 ph so that's why i'll be using a substantial amount of this you might want to stay away from some of the ingredients you might see or read about in other places coffee grounds for instance while a cup of coffee is pretty acidic black coffee has a ph of about 5.0 once you've used the grounds all of that acid has seeped out of the grounds into the coffee and so coffee grounds don't have much of an acidic ph at all in fact they're pretty close to neutral at about 6.8 ph so i'll add coffee grounds to my compost as an organic ingredient but it really doesn't make a difference in acidifying the soil the same with pine needles while a fresh green pine needle might be acidic dried pine needles are much closer to neutral and really don't have an effect on the acid of the soil you've probably heard that you can use vinegar to acidify the soil well sure in the short term vinegar that might be as low as 2.5 ph will acidify the soil but as you'll see here in a few moments the soil life is critical to getting the conditions right the microbes in the soil and vinegar well it's so acidic that it can kill a lot of those soil microbes that we actually want to encourage to get the best results with our potting mix the best way to lower the ph for the long term is to add sulfur to the soil you can add a sulfur fertilizer like ammonium sulfate that can be quite effective i'll be using elemental sulfur and this is sold often as a soil acidifier when blended into the potting soil it lowers the ph the problem is it doesn't do it overnight it actually takes quite a bit of time months it's those soil microbes that take this elemental sulfur and end up lowering the ph in the soil so i'm not planting my blueberries today i'm just getting the soil ready today then i'll put it in the pots and i'll treat the pots as though i was growing plants because what i'm doing is growing the microbes in the soil that are going to lower the ph over a couple months i should see a difference ideally you want to do this at least six months before you plant your blueberries to get the microbes that i need and accelerate the process i'll begin with my own garden soil my garden soil is alive it has some of those microbes that are necessary to lower the ph using the elemental sulfur the ingredients that i'm using and many of the potting mixes that you might buy are probably going to be sterile they're not going to have the microbes so by adding my own garden soil i can encourage the microbes to grow and lower the ph without my soil it might take much longer than six months to lower the ph so to make this recipe i'm using about 40 percent of my native soil and i'll be adding about 30 percent of the total with sphagnum peat moss now the specific measurements i don't think are that important so i'm doing this visually and trying to fill up the wheelbarrow as close as possible to meet that forty percent and thirty percent at this point a main reason why it doesn't need to be precise is because we're looking for a range of ph 4.5 to 5.5 which is really quite a wide range so with four parts native soil and three parts of sphagnum peat moss i feel confident i can get within that range to add some nutrients to this blend i'm using a bagged manure this will give some of the nutrients that the blueberries like to have and so it'll be about 20 percent compost now if you have your own compost that would be ideal because your own compost would be loaded with the soil microbes and the nutrition definitely take that approach if you have that option the final 10 percent is going to be vermiculite blueberries like a well draining soil and the vermiculite especially in a pot helps make sure that we have some good drainage because of the soil test i know my native soil is deficient in some nutrients so i'm using azomite to get some trace minerals and nutrients bone meal an organic way to get phosphorus and green sand an organic way to get potassium blueberries don't need a lot of nitrogen so i'm not adding nitrogen at this time the compost should add the nitrogen that i need in building the soil all of these ingredients also take time they require those same microbes to make them available to the plants in the form that plants want so yet another reason to do this well ahead of time the manufacturer's recommendation for the azomite is one tablespoon per gallon pot now i'm making about 15 gallons of this soil so that's about one cup of the azomite for this mix there aren't specific guidelines for the bone meal but i'll go ahead and use about a cup of this as well and i'll use a cup of the green sand and now we have something for the microbes to begin working on it's difficult finding a good source to give you exactly the recommended amount of elemental sulfur when making a potting mix like this now in my research i found that the soil in wisconsin is similar to mine as far as the ph is concerned and the university of wisconsin recommends to lower the ph for rhododendrons which have a similar requirement as blueberries you should use one pound of elemental sulfur for a 12 square foot area six to eight inches deep now these pots are about three square feet and i want to go down about 16 inches so that means i need about half a pound of this elemental sulfur in this mix half a pound means about one cup so i'm mixing in one cup of this elemental sulfur and now i'll start mixing everything together i'll start with the shovel just to do some of the the large mixing and then i'll get down and actually get close to this soil to try to get some really good blending going on now if i were to use the ammonium sulfate it would actually require six times the amount of the elemental sulfur another reason why the elemental sulfur makes it a little bit easier the ammonium sulfate acts much faster but i like the idea of saving a little money and not having to use too much and possibly overdoing it after a few minutes with the shovel now i can get in break apart any clods and see if i have any areas that need extra mixing the nice thing about the vermiculite is i can see the distribution of it and so when the vermiculite is evenly distributed throughout this mix it's a good indication that everything else is evenly distributed as well with everything blended it's a simple matter to fill up the pots with this acidic potting soil because i'm not planting in this right away it was okay to mix dry ingredients together but i want those microbes to spring into action and those organisms require moisture so now i'll saturate these pots so that all those dry ingredients can now be rehydrated and the microbes can start exploding in population and i'll keep this pot moist up until the time that i plant my blueberries and beyond the final step was to mulch these pots now i used crushed leaves and pine needles as a mulch not because they add any acidity but just because in my high wind environment it's less likely to blow away and it'll help keep the soil moist so i don't have to water as often i also have an inexpensive ph meter and as i put it in initially i can see that the ph is pretty close to that 7.0 that i'm beginning with i'll test it on a fairly regular basis to see that those microbes are doing their job and lowering the ph that's the whole point but it is going to take some time these pots are now going to be ready for my blueberries in a few months i'm gardener scott enjoy gardening [Music]

Channel: Gardener Scott

Views: 234,317

Keywords: gardener scott, gardner scott, growing blueberries, planting blueberries in a pot, blueberry plants in pots, planting blueberries in container, blueberry plants how to grow, best soil for blueberry plants, make blueberry soil acidic, how to make blueberry soil, make soil for blueberries, how to make soil acidic for blueberries

Id: tRlPqseslr8

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022