I'm not an expert on blueberries, but I do have a few plants which mostly feed the birds. They are a shrubby plant and can get quite large so I'm not sure if I'd put them in SFG. I'm fairly certain that you need more than one variety to get correct pollination. Lastly, blueberries prefer acidic soil, not the mid ph composted loveliness that we have in our SFG beds. If I paid better attention, I'd feed with Holly-tone. Do you have another area of your yard that you can plant the bushes?

I just planted Saskatoon berries which are supposed to taste like blueberries but don't require the acidity. They are a large shrub, so they are planted in the yard not the garden area.

The roots may be rather shallow, but certainly more than 6" and they spread way more than 1' in width. You need at least two different varieties for pollination. I think it would be a disaster to plant them in such a small area.

Here is a link that might be useful: Annie's Kitchen Garden

I ordered 3 different varieties (early, mid summer, and late summer producing), so pollination won't be a problem. I kinda forgot that they are a bush for some reason, so I was thinking that instead of one big box, I could do three 3x3 boxes with a 1 and a half foot, maybe two foot box for each blueberry. Do they have to be right next to each other to pollinate or can they be spread out like 15 or so feet between each plant?

I just planted two new bushes in half barrels. Mine are about 8' apart, but I don't know how well this will work. My old blueberry bed had three bushes, spaced in a triangle, about 3 feet apart, but they were touching when full grown. Sinfonian is the blueberry man here, so I would bet he'll be in here to answer your questions. One thing he said in his blog was do NOT plant them deeper than they were at the nursery, even a fraction of an inch can kill them. Maybe that's why one of my new ones doesn't look so good.

Here is a link that might be useful: Annie's Kitchen Garden

You don't want to plant blueberries in the square foot garden, because they prefer a soil ph of between 4.5 and 5. All other veggies prefer 6 to 6.5. Although the numbers don't look like much of a difference, it is actually a HUGE difference.

EG

EG, he's only planning on putting strawberries in that same bed. They will both grow fine in acidic soil. He just needs room for those roots to grow!

Here is a link that might be useful: Annie's Kitchen Garden

Oh! Thanks...

EG

How far do the roots spread? Would somewhere around 2 square feet be big enough for them? They'll be in at least 12 inches of mix with that I plan on amending with sulfur to lower the pH.

Granny's right. What I'm thinking about doing now is 3 3x3x6' boxes with a 2x2x12 box in the middle of each box, so the soil in the boxes would be separate from each other. I'd make the shorter box out of regular 2x6's and the taller one out of 2x12's or just two 2x2x6 boxes stacked on top of each other. I would probably just lay some cardboard underneath so the roots could still go down deeper if they needed too.

If this really has no way of actually working, I could plant the blueberries in the ground somewhere and plant the blackberries I bought in the box instead.

If the strawberries will grow fine in the same soil, I wonder if it would work to build the main box 6" tall , fill it, then set the 2x2 on top (or near the top) for the blueberry. That way the blueberry has deeper soil and can also send some roots out into the main bed as well.

Just a thought...
I hope that made sense the way I wrote it...

Greenbean, that would probably be doable. I'm trying to remember just how large the root ball was on the ones I dug out last year. I'm quite sure the root spread was more than 2 feet, but I cut the smaller roots with a shovel when I removed them. I'm quite sure I didn't dig out a 2'x2' root ball! If homertherat leaves the bottom open so the roots can go deeper if they want, I think the 2x2 by 18" deep might work. That would actually be quite close to the size of the barrels I'm using. I'm not even close to being an expert on blueberries, though...I've only grown three in my lifetime, and never did learn how to properly prune them!

Granny

Here is a link that might be useful: Annie's Kitchen Garden

I wonder how they'd do in a box because they get enormous. My hubby's grandpa's farm has some wonderful old blueberry bushes. The bigger ones out there there are at least 8 feet across. Of course, they are about 20 years old.

We bought 10 blueberry bushes for here at the house this spring, but we planted them in the ground. The nursery suggested planting them at least 5 feet apart, so we put them in two rows of 5 plants with 5 feet between each bush and 10 feet between the rows. The nursery said blueberries are a lot like azalea bushes with shallow roots as has already been discussed and similar nutrient needs. For organic gardening they recommended fertilizing once a year in the spring with 1/2 bone meal and 1/2 blood meal.

Rachel

Here is a link that might be useful: LookMaNoWeeds

I do have a spot that I could plant them in the ground, but my soil is far from acidic. According to the local extension, it would take somewhere from 4-5 ounces of elemental sulfur to lower the pH to the point that it isn't alkaline anymore. Then it would require even more to lower it to between 4 and 5 pH.

Do I have to regularly add something to the soil to keep the pH low after planting? Will the sulfur eventually leach out of the soil so I have to keep adding it?

If it's in a box, monitoring and maintaining the pH would be much easier. I was thinking about ditching the idea of them both in one box and just making one for strawberries and one for each blueberry bush, 18" tall.

Or, could I dig a hole 12 inches deep, put the 18" tall box in the bottom of it and then fill it with Mel's Mix amended with pH lowering stuff and then put the strawberry box around that box? Or would that be pointless?

The blueberry box would be 2 square feet and 18" tall. When buried in the ground, it would only stick out 6 inches and so it wouldn't totally block out the sun for the few strawberry plants behind the bush. I really want this idea to work...

I have alkaline soil, and my blueberries grew well for nearly 20 years with a bit of peat moss and some steer manure just applied to the surface of the soil each spring. I mixed them equally and applied about an inch to the entire bed. I didn't work it in, because my bushes had a lot of roots near the surface.

Here is a link that might be useful: Annie's Kitchen Garden

I just can't decide what I should do. I can either do my box thing as mentioned in my last post, or I could plant them in a spot that gets a very heavy soak of water every week (2-3 hours of full irrigation, meaning about 3 inches of water on top for pretty much the entire time) and full sun. Do blueberries like lots of water and sun? I could always just fix the ditch so the water doesn't go on to that part of the grass if they don't like that much water.

I would have to mix stuff into the soil to lower the pH in either situation, but if I planted them just in the ground, it would be much more work. Would the irrigation wash all my pH lowering stuff away? Would it hurt the things down stream from the berries because of the acidic-ness?

So many questions...

I don't have any answers on blueberries but my soil is very, very alkaline and one thing to consider with acid loving plants in my area is our hard water which exacerbates the problem, keep that in mind as well when amending your soil.

We will be planting a Japanese Maple soon and we will basically build it's own bed in order to get as much of the acidified soil as possible to it and will water it most often with softened water.