A Sisterly Rivalry Leads Directly to Pies

MAYBE it is just sibling rivalry, but I have an uncontrollable urge to grow blueberries this year.

Summer

My sister, Martha, who lives in New Hampshire, likes to torture me with stories of canoeing on crystal-clear lakes, where the wild high-bush blueberries hang down over the water and you scoop them into your mouth until your lips turn purple. She also tells me about crawling around in mountaintop meadows in Maine, grazing on the tiny, powdery blueberries of the low-bush types. It takes forever to fill a pail, but they’re so tasty you keep on picking, dreaming of pie.

I know those stories are true, because I’ve been there with her. But I don’t have to go to New England for blueberries. I can grow them right here, in my Maryland garden, or in planters on the terrace.

Blueberries are incredibly tough, versatile plants. The low-bush, sun-loving native Vaccinium angustifolium grows wild from just south of the Arctic tundra clear down to Georgia. The high-bush native V. corymbosum, which frequents bogs and lightly shaded woodlands, rambles all through the East, over to Michigan and Oregon. The Southern rabbit-eye blueberry V. ashei, a high-bush type, is native to Florida, and grows up to North Carolina and west to Mississippi. Other native species thrive in the Northwest.

Thanks to hybridizers, cultivated blueberries can be grown just about anywhere, as long as you get the soil right and don’t let the plants dry out.

“Our early varieties are starting to bear right now,” said Mark Gaskell, a farm adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension Service in Santa Maria, Calif. Southern high-bush blueberry cultivars available to the home grower that do well along the central California coast, like Sharpblue, Gulf Coast, Marimba and Georgia Gem, bear fruit from February through June, he said.

Up at Nasami Farm, a native plant nursery in Whately, Mass., run by the New England Wild Flower Society, low-bush blueberries are preferred to high-bush ones because they can take the cold and do well in sandy, low-nutrient soil.

“The flavor is more intense — the smaller fruits have a little extra sugar,” said Ron M. Wik, the Wild Flower Society’s nursery business director. “As long as they get a good six hours of sunlight, they’re fine. We have them growing on a green roof installation in downtown Boston,” at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Nasami Farm’s most popular blueberry plants include Earliblue, Patriot, Blueray, Bluecrop and Chandler, Mr. Wik said.

But no matter where you are, the trick is acid soil — with a pH between 4.5 and 5.0 — with plenty of drainage. And don’t overfertilize. Those are the lessons I learned one euphoric afternoon in early March, from Jim and Bethany Plyler. They grow about 1,000 blueberry bushes — high, low and in between — along with other native plants at Natural Landscapes Nursery (www.naturallandscapesnursery.com), in West Grove, Pa. Mr. Plyler, a former landscaper and ecologically minded farmer, started the 44-acre nursery 22 years ago, and 14 years later teamed up with his wife, who has a master’s degree in botany.

He is partial to the high-bush blueberry, Vaccinium corymbosum. “It’s a four-season plant,” he said, standing in one of his fields, where about 500 of the red-stemmed bushes marched down wide, raised beds.

Consider the high-bush blueberry in winter: the deep red stems catch the eye under a gray sky. By May, those delicate branches will be loaded with nodding bell-shaped flowers, reminiscent of lily-of-the-valley, that open pink and turn to white, and smell like jasmine. In June, after bumblebees pollinate the flowers, the berries will begin to turn from green to violet to dark blue. And by July, the feast begins.

“Why not grow the biggest, sweetest berries?” said Mr. Plyler, who also likes V. corymbosum’s many cultivars, known for their large fruit. The Plylers have had great success with Collins, which ripens in early June; Bluejay and Blueray, which bear fruit by the Fourth of July; and Jersey, which ripens a couple of weeks later. “Last year, we got 10 to 20 pounds per bush,” he said. “The plants were so loaded they couldn’t hold their branches up.”

The Plylers also grow V. angustifolium, a low-bush blueberry with a cycle of white flowers, blue berries and crimson foliage that is just as striking as that of its high-bush cousin.

Northcountry, a cross between high and low species developed by the University of Minnesota, and Sunshine Blue, a Southern beauty that sports pink flowers and grows to only three feet, also flourish here.