What to Do With a Blueberry Bush in June – 4 Key Jobs to Help Protect Your Delicious Harvest
Early summer can be a delicate time for berries. Here’s how to ensure you get a good yield
June is primarily a month when blueberry bushes are developing fruit. In some climates, the season may have arrived, but for most gardeners, it is a time to nurture plants to guarantee fresh pickings of tasty, highly nutritious berries come midsummer.
Watering and protecting the crop are top priorities, along with feeding in certain circumstances, such as when you are growing blueberries in containers. As the crop is steadily growing, giving it the water and nutrients it needs guarantees good-sized berries, and protection stops birds from robbing your berries before you get to enjoy them.
If your fruits are ready, pick away. If yours aren’t, the season is tantalizingly close, and what you do this month can make a big difference. I always keep a close eye on my blueberries in early summer, as I don’t want to lose any of those precious berries currently on the bush. When it comes to what to do with a blueberry bush in June, I always recommend these tasks.
What to Do With a Blueberry Bush in June: 4 Key Tasks
Before getting on to those all-important steps that will help a bush develop its burgeoning fruits, a mention does need to be made for those lucky homeowners for whom blueberry season has started.
June is the start of the peak harvesting season for blueberries in the US. The season in North America runs from June to August, but the exact timing depends on location, weather, and the type of bushes. Growers in the south-east, south-west, and parts of the Mid-Atlantic usually expect to be picking in June.
If your fruits are ready, enjoy harvesting blueberries in June. As blueberries ripen gradually across any bush, pick fruits that are blue throughout every few days to get them at their peak.
A ripe blueberry should easily detach if you roll the berry between your thumb and index fingers. Or you can get a berry picker to run over the bushes to separate the fruits from the bush, like this berry picker with a metallic comb at Amazon.
1. Protect Fruits From Birds
For many growers, blueberry bushes will be busy developing those tasty fruits in early summer. You want to get a blueberry bush to fruit prolifically and develop a plethora of berries. What you don’t want is to lose all those fruits to unwanted visitors, in this case, birds.
Birds are attracted to developing fruits for essential calories and water. To stop them from ransacking your blueberry bush this month, the best tactic is to protect soft fruit in your yard with garden netting.
A mesh netting with holes no larger than five mm by five mm should suffice to protect soft fruits in your yard, such as this garden netting at Amazon.
It is best to place the netting over a frame. Don’t just sit it on the bushes, as the birds can just sit on the netting and peck the berries through the netting if it is touching the plants.
Any netting must be secured to the ground, with weights or landscape staples, available at Amazon, too. This prevents birds from getting in, only to get trapped under the netting.
Or you can get fruit cages to put over blueberry bushes, like this six-foot by eight-foot by four-foot plant cage at Wayfair.
2. Water Plants in Dry Spells
Blueberries need consistent moisture as they develop and ripen. As the plants have shallow roots, regular watering can often be required in early summer, especially during dry periods.
Blueberry bushes ideally want 1-2 inches of water per week, either from rainfall or additional watering, but this need increases when they are developing fruits. A soil moisture meter, available at Amazon, offers a quick, simple way to see if your plants need watering.
Deep watering is always recommended (so the moisture soaks into the soil), and it is ideally done in the morning. A shorter sprinkling of moisture could see most of the water lost due to evaporation before the bushes' roots can take it in. If this happens and the top layer of the soil dries out in the summer, bushes often react to heat stress by dropping fruits.
Blueberries prefer acidic conditions, so they want to be kept well-watered with rainwater, which has a lower pH than tap water.
Their desire for rainwater makes rainwater harvesting important when you grow blueberries and other acid-loving plants, so consider adding a rain barrel to your yard to collect this precious, natural resource.
3. Keep Your Eyes Peeled for Pests
Early summer can be a prime time for blueberry pests that may affect your yield. It is advisable to check the plants regularly for signs of damage or infestation. Check the leaves, shoots, flowers, and fruits for holes, wilting, or other insect activity.
Pests, including aphids, flea beetles, spider mites, cutworms, Japanese beetles, blueberry maggots, and spotted-wing drosophila, can affect bushes in early summer.
Smaller pests, such as aphids and spider mites, can be combatted by spraying them off with a jet of water or using insecticidal soaps (you can get ready-to-use insecticidal soap at Walmart, though these sprays can also affect beneficial insects, so they need to be used with caution).
It may seem unpleasant, but small infestations of larger pests can be hand-picked. For a less squeamish way to prevent pests, use fine insect-proof netting with holes under 1mm (such as this insect netting at Amazon) to stop all manner of blueberry pests, or use companion planting to deter pests and encourage natural predators.
If you are after good natural pest control plants to repel both aphids and spider mites, opt for dill or marigolds.
4. Feed Blueberries in Pots
You can grow blueberries in pots, and when you do, they need to be fed much more regularly than plants growing in the ground. It becomes an important task throughout the summer to get the best crop of berries.
Bushes in the ground may need just one feed per year in spring. However, when growing fruit in pots, you need a consistent fertilizing regime. I tended to feed blueberry bushes in containers every few weeks during the growing season.
In June, the bushes need lots of nutrients to develop and ripen fruits. They can all too easily use up all that goodness in the limited soil in the container. To ensure they have the nutrients they need, fertilize blueberries with a liquid ericaceous fertilizer every two or three weeks from April to September.
Use a product like this acid-loving plant fertilizer at Amazon. Simply mix it at the recommended rate in a watering can, and apply when you water plants.
What to Shop
Brightwell is a hybrid blueberry bush for growing outdoors in zones 7-9. It is known to produce reliable harvests of flavorful medium to large berries.
This beautiful watering can has a one-gallon capacity and is perfect for watering and feeding blueberries. It is made of weather-resistant galvanized steel to minimize wear.
These long-sleeved leather gardening gloves have a gorgeous floral pattern. Suitable for a plethora of gardening tasks, they comfortably protect your hands and arms.
As mentioned throughout this guide, blueberries prefer acidic soil. It is beneficial to check your soil pH each spring to ensure it remains suitable for the plants. You can get a simple, effective soil test kit from Amazon to get professional lab analysis and results.
If the results show the pH is too high, you can make the soil more acidic by adding sulfur, iron sulfate (get iron sulfate soil conditioner at Walmart), or aluminum sulfate. It may not have the same immediate impact as some of those outlined above, but you can also use spent coffee grounds as a soil amendment.
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