Sunday, June 25, 2017

Everyone Likes Blueberries!

So as the title says: Everyone Likes Blueberries.  If not, then who are you?  Lots of states grow blueberries, and Oregon is one.  Michigan is #1 in acreage though.  But Oregon's are just as good I'm sure, especially when grown with AgroLiquid.  Eric and I visited this large farm in Amity, OR which is South of Portland.  They are doing some field comparisons with AgroLiquid.
The AgroLiquid program has both drip and foliar applications.  This is the AgroLiquid block on 'Draper' variety blueberries.  They are certainly tall and bushy.  Measure against Eric who is 9' tall. Well probably not quite that tall I guess.  But they are big.  You couldn't easily walk through the rows.
And they are loaded up.  By starting to turn color, harvest is not far off.  It was interesting to note that the place is loud with all kinds of bird noise.  But this noise is out of speakers and the farm has them in place to scare away the birds who are waiting for the berries to turn blue and sweet.  Good luck.  Although I don't recall seeing any of the flying kind.  Just the noise kind.
We also noticed shoots coming from the base for future limbs of production.
Now here is the grower's program on another similar 'Draper' block where other "specialty" type fertilizer is used.  This is in line with where Eric was walking, but there was not near the size and they weren't as green.  They did seem to have lot's of berries though.  But the plants weren't as big so probably have less.  Harvest will tell us.  But you could easily walk through the rows and we did not see very much new shoot growth.  But again, will wait for harvest as I admittedly see things through Agro-green tinted glasses.  But this is what we saw.  We made a video of our visit that hopefully will be shared on the web-site someplace for family viewing.
And waiting for harvest looks like some new harvesters.  They'll need them for sure.  We are supposed to get yield comparisons on these different fertilizer blocks.  So hopefully in the future I can give a report on programs and yields.
So don't those look similar to the ones at Kauai Coffee that has been shown in several blog posts over the years.  Except these are new and shiny.  Well they use blueberry harvesters there for coffee you know.  Since they aren't likely to be using these in the winter here, maybe they can swim them over to Kauai to help with the coffee harvest.  Or not.