I dont have Pink Icing, but I have several other blueberries. I certainly don't baby mine. I try to protect them from deer and the older ones get normal pruning (just don't ask me for advice on that), but I don't worry about disease or anything. I would expect it to be deciduous for you in zone 5b, since semi-evergreen usually means (in my experience) evergreen for the warmest couple zones and deciduous for the rest of us.

Here are a couple of mine:

(Berkeley, in ground 2 or 3 years.)

(Jersey, in ground something like 9 years - Pink Icing should not get this big)

(The two of them in dormancy, preweeding)

I love mine, but I’m in 9 in south Louisiana. They aren’t very full and bushy but the little tinker bell looking flowers are so cute and the berries are great. I stuff them into my beds with my drift roses in the backyard. But i don’t think they are full enough to be foundation

mine are called rabbit eye i think

Thanks for the feedback, and the photographs! I might still want one for somewhere else on the property, but I was surprised to see them recommended for a foundation planting.

z5 is about half the US and very divergent ... big city name might help ...

key words from gal's post: As long as your soil suits their needs

do you know how much soil amending you would need to succeed ??? .. a soil test would be a good place to start ...

ken

Thanks very much for the additional information! I am in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. That means we get like 4 nice months a year.

Truthfully I will have a landscaper install whatever I decide to go with, so the soil can be amended to the needs of whatever I wind up choosing. As nice as the idea of evergreen shrubs are, around here that mostly means pine-needle looking things, which I dislike, and I don't spend much time outside during the cold months anyway. I would much rather have something I love wholeheartedly during the summer months vs. something I don't really like very much that is technically in leaf year-round.

You all are starting to make me think a few blueberry shrubs with some roses in front might be a good idea, but I don't know if I have the room for both in my front yard plant bed. It is just over 6 ft. deep (and I think like 12-14 ft. wide) and I wasn't really planning to extend it.

All right, here is my silly mockup. It's the plant bed in front of the bay window. It shows the blueberries in the back, two poorly photoshopped shrub roses in front, and a random assortment of something like catmint/Russian sage/lavender - some kind of purple border that might be overkill. From what I've read it seems that the blueberries and roses should like the same environment. Otherwise my next choice, in lieu of the blueberries, would be Nordic Inkberry, which is supposedly an evergreen, but no tasty fruits for me (or fruit at all, because it is male).

Blueberries need acid soil and won’t like your soil. Not only does your area have alkaline soil but foundations tend to make it even more so.

tj

The soil pH is like 7, hopefully not too hard to amend. But then again, maybe this is "the catch" I was trying to sniff out in my opening post. I visited my local nursery and they seemed to think the blueberries would do well. Interestingly, they said they no longer stock inkberries or any hollies because they got too many complaints about them.

We have a blueberry garden as a foundation planting in the back of our house. It’s on the Southern and around the corner to the Eastern exposure. It works for us being closer to the house for ease of maintenance, harvesting, kids like it, and to sort of keep wildlife away from the berries. A problem I see with using blueberries primarily as an ornamental in the front of a house is pruning. You can certainly make a beautiful shrub out of many varieties. Some have blueish foliage. But a big bushy compact blueberry plant might not be the most productive. For berries, you want to prune out weak canes, and create a less bushy shape. Basically you could go for production or a pretty shrub that happens to make edible berries. One other thing to maybe consider: depending on how old the cement for your foundation is, alkaline minerals could leech into the soil and affect the acidity. So if you’re already struggling to keep the soil acidic, it could maybe complicate that.

There are reasons why you don’t commonly see cute little blueberry shrubs tucked into people’s perennial gardens. For blueberries, your soil PH needs to be between 5.0 and 4.0. Most other plants won’t like that. Blueberries want well-drained soil but also consistently moist soil. Your Russian sage may not like that. It likes to dry out completely. And Russian sage will hate the acidic soil. The roses will demand lots of fertilizer and a loamy soil. Your blueberries do not like too much fertilizer, especially too much Nitrogen. Your blueberries would do better in a raised bed of several bails of peat mixed with existing soil, compost, and sand and or bark mulch mixed into soil. Add bagged soil acidification. You can plant the blueberries with azaleas, Rhododendrons, holly, I even plant strawberries around mine. The blueberries will want Sun so don’t allow to be too shaded by the other shrubs. Some blueberry varieties are slightly more forgiving than others. Reka (developed in New Zealand from US stock) is known to be a little more adaptable, cold tolerant, huge berries, and a nice shaped shrub. Razz is also said to be adaptable and a nice shrub. Bluecrop is adaptable but is less known for landscape beauty potential.

Rhododendrons and azaleas do not do well around here and blueberries probably will do even worse. The soil tends to be heavy clay on the alkaline side. A few people including me have tried to grow rhododendrons and azaleas, but after a few years you give up and try things that make more sense for our environment.