Hügelkultur Blueberry Beds

Guest Post by Articles of Confederation

For the record, I’m going to keep these letters as short as possible. I am dedicated to serving y’all with what little knowledge I have of this rock called Earth, but I also have a lot to accomplish before November 2020. I’d rather just answer people’s questions with “Do this”, “Don’t do that”, and “I don’t have experience with that.”

I’m personally not a big fan of blueberries, even though I realize they are justifiably classified as a superfood. Their health benefits are thoroughly documented online, such as at Mother Earth News, so start there if you don’t know what they offer. The primary reason I wanted to grow them was for my wife and elder daughter. They love the dang things and eat them as snacks or add them to their morning waffles. My wife is a hell of a cook…it’s a shame I don’t eat breakfast anymore.

Our home, a one-story, humble rancher, sits atop a hill (apparently an old Civil War redoubt) overlooking a cedar glade to the west. We’re about 650 feet off the country road that winds through the hollow, give or take 10-15 feet. The front three acres was covered in weed species like Eastern red cedar, hackberry, several American elms, ash, and cottonwood. I was more than satisfied with chipping the entire glade and my wife wanted to get picturesque views of the sunset over the hollow, so it was sort of a win-win for us. (Plus, I really didn’t feel like dealing with emerald ash borers or elm bark beetles. It was a big enough issue eradicating the Japanese beetles, another Asian gift that keeps on giving. But I digress.)

Blueberry plantings pose a problem across quite a bit of middle Tennessee due to the terrain. There are some exceptions, but the alkaline nature of limestone and the poor drainage make it extremely difficult without a well-formed plan and some critical thinking. I guess where I’m going with this is that if you have it better than we do, you’ll do fine with a lot less effort. We had to overcome the following:

1. Soil pH;
2. Poor drainage; and
3. Depth to bedrock – blueberry roots really only need 10-12” of soil depth, but the glade had fully eroded in many areas.

Without further ado, let me describe my process of constructing it, its dimensions, its composition, etc. I wanted to experiment with hügelkultur and I had loads of trees to denude, so the first issue was getting an arborist to chain them and who also had a monster chipper to maximize my piles of wood chips for the (at that time, my future) orchard. (I’ll discuss hügelkultur in depth in another post as time permits.) I contracted a team for a day to clear as much as they could, and without being overly concerned about stump grinding. I was eventually going to bury all of them anyways. If memory serves me, they cleared about 43 trees in a full day’s work. Each tree ranged from scrubby 6” to fully 18” in diameter. It was cords of wood, even with the leftover mulch hills (probably two truckloads, or 40 yards) that my kids would climb like Mt. Everest.

I then chose the area with the worst prognosis for growing anything with deep root systems. Like I said, blueberries tend to have a shallow, fibrous root structure. The bed layout was 10’ x 18’ with an odd curvature to it, so as to marry my meandering driveway about 50’ away. If you’ve been to Monticello, envision its approach but on a far less impressive scale. The slope in that area was and is ludicrous, about 16%-17% with no more than 6” of heavy clay soil – if you can classify anaerobic peanut butter as soil. It drives me batshit crazy and I was bound and determined to decrease the slope of the bed to no greater than 3-5%. It’s also in a slightly dappled locale with a few scrubby 20’ ft. trees nearby, although virtually all-day sun except the late afternoon.

I didn’t have a tractor at the time and in fact didn’t get one until last year. I used a 2-wheel, 8 cubic foot piece of plastic junk wheelbarrow to move Lord knows how many cords of wood to fill up the area mentioned above. (If you want to know how to lose 40 lbs. and become a beast again, do this for two full years from winter through a hot Southern summer.) At the top it required only one level of logs and by the time we got to the back side, we were at 3 full layers of the largest logs turned perpendicular to the rest of the pile so as to prevent roll.

After each log layer/level was complete, I mixed a single 3 cubic ft. bag of sphagnum peat (these actual bags) with a 2 cubic ft. bag of garden soil (these actual bags), ½ of a bag of perlite for drainage (these actual bags), and a child’s bucket of sand. Two points to make here. First, if I had to do it over, I’d have bought OMRI-listed garden soil (these actual, 1.5 cubic ft. bags) because the 2 : 1 ratio between sphagnum : soil settles my mind for whatever anal retentive reason; it’s cheaper; and it’s not Frankensteined. Second, my two oldest children didn’t use their 4’ x 6’ sandbox anymore and the sand smelled like the bottom of Hillary Clinton’s feet. It was fetid but I wanted to reuse it for drainage in something I’d never ever see or smell again.

After it was all mixed in the wheelbarrow, I held my nose and had the kids push it between the logs and mash it down with their bare feet. (They wanted to be barefoot so they could feel the sphagnum between their toes.) I don’t know how many times we performed this ritual or how much money I spent on the materials. We did it across the entire blueberry bed once each layer of logs was completed. However, it wasn’t about “time and materials” for us. I wanted them to reconnect with the Earth and it worked like a charm.

Once the bed was complete, I bought many (perhaps 15-20)  3 cubic ft. bags of pine bark mulch (these actual bags) to dress the top. They’re a middle-class man’s way of mulching the bed with a naturally acidifying component. The true test came when I measured the pH and, in the aggregate, it settled around 5.0. Just right, considering the highbush varieties I was planting prefer a pH range of 4.5 – 5.5. Remember that pH is a logarithmic scale so do take it seriously. However, and in my personal experience, I’ve noticed that hügelkultur beds seem to please whatever is planted in them over time, but my experience only extends the last 4 years.

All of the above granted me enough space to comfortably plant the following 8 varieties:

• Legacy (Northern Highbush)
• Misty (Southern Highbush)
• Sunshine Blue (supposed to be Southern Dwarf, but mine must have forgotten that)
• Sweet Crisp or Sweetcrisp (Southern Highbush)
• Sweetheart (Northern/Southern Highbush hybrid)
• 3 varieties that my wife bought at Lowe’s, so I really don’t recall what they are

The final spacing between the 8 bushes was about 6’ between rows (I’ll probably regret putting them too close) and about 4-5’ between bushes. Again, it’s an oddly curved design so the spacing varies ever so slightly.

If you do the above in my neck of the woods, you’ll easily have healthy blueberry bushes for 50 years. Hope this helps!

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