Bushel and Berry® Southern Bluebelle™ Blueberry Plant

Only year two for our blueberry bush, but it is strong and healthy with thick with limbs and leaves. and looks lovely next to our gardenia bushes.

We plan to prune it a bit this fall and will wait for it to start producing fruit in year three.
It has a good start and is going strong the past two years in the grow bag pot we have it in.
(Using a grow bag since we may move eventually and don't want to leave all this deliciousness behind when we go!)

Along my potted plant walkway to my garden that contains 9 different blueberry varieties including a Misty, O'neal is by far the most blueberry tasting and sweetest one. I'm in Zone 9A Florida and it is also growing the strongest of the others. Just came back from a commercial blueberry farm and tasted many others but none are as sweet or tasty. So happy with this plant and harvest so now I'm getting two more.

Mine did not make it not sure why came to me as a beautiful plant so It was not them but me.

Buy more than one. While they are self pollinating, my little bushes began producing more with each addition. My best ones are planted under Slash Pines with only dappled morning or really late afternoon sun. The pine needles will provide natural mulch, and the would is wonderfully acidic. They will survive the heat just fine if you water them regularly. Unfortunately, I lost one because I didn't water it enough during a short drought with high heat, and I live on an oak hammock.

I possess 2 Southern Bluebelles: 1 from a local garden center and 1 from Stark Bro's. If you don't mulch your blueberries, they could suffer badly during the spring/summer heat, especially the Southern Bluebelle variety. I learned the hard way from one of my Southern Bluebelle plants that wasn't mulched back in middle spring 2019 and it displayed symptoms of what looks like typical potassium defiencies: sudden burning leaf tips and wilting of the flowers. In my response I tried adding more high potassium fertilizer (langbeinite) and watering it every day, of which the results had shown not much improvement and the plant still struggled. I also checked the pH to see if that too might've factored, but the results read a pH value of 4.7(which is perfect for blueberries). Finally I came to terms that mulching may be the reason, so then I applied fir bark mulch around the plant to soon find that it made a HUGE difference. within a month my Southern Bluebelle was recovering rather quickly, and now in the beginning of October, it's in much better shape now then it was before it suffered heat stress.

For the one I ordered from Stark Bro's, I purchased that one along with the Perpetua variety after recieving Blueberry Buckle and Jelly Bean from the week before. This particular one came in rather small but appeared to be neatly pruned (it looked like a bonsai), I then transplanted it in a 2gal pot (mulched) and throughtout the summer it grew very quick. It's now almost twice the size then when I recieved it in middle June. Now October it's now in a 16'' inch square planter but its foliage growth seems to slow down a bit.

Summary: Southern Bluebelle is a quick grower, but is very susceptible to heat stress. So always mulch with this variety or any.

Not even a handful or berries yet but the foliage is attractive.

I have purchased 3 of these plants and all 3 have struggled enormously in the heat. I thought it was my own failings to provide appropriate growing conditions until I realized that the one plant that had been in half shade was still alive on the shaded side. I'm in zone 7b but it was too much heat for them and now I'm out a lot of money.

Unfortunate the little plant couldn't survive. Probably not as heat tolerant as I hoped it would be. It could be it was bad this year, because my Sunshine Blue I bought this year, which one of reviewers said grows well in LA, didn't survive either. My Peach Sorbet is suffering, but still alive and my 2 Blueberry Buckles are still growing. Buckles definitely are very heat tolerant.

Bushel and Berry plants are persona non grata in my Dallas Texas garden. I'm surprised they didn't spontaneously combust. Every single in of them died. Stick with o'neal, misty, and the other southern blueberry plants. What a waste.

These just didn't thrive. Expensive mistake. I use stark for my trees and they've been good, guess I need new place for blueberries since none of the three did well I'm soil our other blueberries are fruiting in. They are pink popcorn, pink lemonade and several blue fruited. We are gonna keep them in ground until we can find replacements but so far they just aren't growing.