Blueberries like moist well drained acid soil a heavy mulch with pine bark or oak leaves. Treat em like azeleas and they should be ok

Here is a link that might be useful: U of F Blueberry Guide

They plant BB all the time in FL, use lots of pine bark and peat moss to provide the acid environment. Your choice of drip irrigation should work great. Emerald BB are growing extremely well for me.

Gary

I was recently told by a farmer that if your water is alkaline then it will also change the ph the wrong way and mess them up.

Thanks for the info. Mom's has a lot of big healthy azaleas so she shouldn't have a problem with blueberries then.

Karalynn,

This is what I would do......

Go to lowes and buy peat and bags of pine bark nuggets. Bring the peat home and dump it in a garbage can and fill the can with water and let the peat soak until it is saturated. Take the pine bark and dump it out on your driveway and run over it with your vehicle a few dozen times to make it break up into very small pieces, smaller the better. Mix the bark, peat and native soil in roughly equal parts.

Make a hole at least 3 times the width of the pot and put the plant in and surround it with the peat/soil/bark mix. The reason for the wide hole is to give it the soil it likes to get off to a fast start and gives you time to address the surrounding soil. Water it well.

BB are not azaleas and you do not want the BB to just limp along as a lot of azaleas do you want it to take off rapidly and yield as much fruit as possible and just popping it in our soil and mulching it that plant will limp or die.....trust me on that.

You can mulch the BB with the pulverized pine chips but I would not use the whole bark nuggets as they take much too long to break down and are too course as they are. A better solution if you don't have access to pine fines
is compost or just plain woodchips like from a tree service or that can be taken for free from our local dump. If you need chips you are welcome to stop and get a few garbage cans full as I have 10 or so truckloads on hand (thanks Nelsons)

Take the wood chips and starting where you ended at the triple width planting hole (which should be at least a couple feet away from the BB) pour the wood chips on the native soil and stomp them in a bit till all is level again. Now take Tiger 90 sulphur ($10.00 for a 50 pound bag) and sprinkle some on the woodchips you stomped on the soil........scattered so the pellets should be 1-2 inches apart and spreading out a few feet around the plant and walk on them as well. Do not scatter the sulphur on the area where you combined the soil/peat/bark and planted the bush. Now you can mulch the area more heavily, say 6 inches deep and walk on that as well to pack it down a little and you can use the wood chips up to a few inches from the bush and as it rots down keep adding more. Now the why......

The soil, peat, bark mix will give the bush what it wants and the right PH. It will take a year (at least) for the roots to make it to where you started the woodchips and sulphur and by then the chips will be breaking down nicely and the sulphur will have acidified the soil. At this point a soil test in the area you applied the sulphur is a very good idea and you can go from there.

Contrary to popular wisdom you can hurt that newly planted BB by watering it too much due to our water being of a high PH......I live on the lakes here in Citrus and my well water PH is 8......the lake water is a bit better but still 7+. Water deeply weekly and make sure that mulch stays 6 inches thick. Watering too much will just expose the plant to a PH it does not like. The peat can only buffer so much water. Collected rainwater would be much better. Or.......and please if you do this be careful... you can acidify your tap water..which is what I do. I add fresh battery acid (sulphuric) to the water to adjust the PH. Any auto parts store will sell it ($4 a quart which lasts a LONG time) I use the lake water and just scoop it out with my front end loader. By the time I trek back up and some sloshes out I will have 25 gallons or so in the loader. To that I add 2 tsp's of battery acid and stir. Instant lower PH, in this case it drops the PH from 7+ to about 5. You just need litmus paper or pool test strips to figure out how much acid you need to acidify say a garbage can full of water. If you have pool strips and the color chart does not go to PH 5 just take a strip and dip it in normal black coffee and note the color. You want the same color when you add acid to water. Black coffee is just about a perfect PH 5. As a side note the BB bushes will love your used coffee grounds. Acid is dangerous so caution is needed but it is a very easy process. Do not use Muriatic acid.....while it does acidify it simply changes to salt so is a bad idea.

Ignore the advice not to fertilize the first year. Wait a month then hit the bushes with Miracid (Ace hardware in town has it) or the new miracle gro azalea camellia stuff. Use it half strength the first application if the plants are small and then full strength monthly after that stopping in October. When the plants get bigger you can switch to dry fertilizer and I would recommend 12-4-8 ( $12 for 50 pounds).

Remove the blooms the first year. If the plants are small leave them alone and only prune dead wood. If they are bigger producing bushes prune them just as soon as the fruit is done.