Rooting rabbiteye blueberry suckers
One of the benefits of rabbiteye blueberries
is that the mature plants send up suckers a few feet away from the main
bush. If you treat these suckers well, you end up with free
blueberry bushes!
My father's rabbiteye
blueberry patch is four or five years older than mine, so he's been
tantalizing me with descriptions of blueberry suckers for years
now. I only noticed the first suckers around my biggest plant this
year, though.
"Should I protect the
suckers from mowing for a year and then dig them up, or should I dig
them up now?" I asked Daddy. He reported that the suckers don't
grow many more roots even if you wait a year, so I opted to dig up what I
could find now. As you can see from the photo above, there
definitely were very few feeder roots on these young suckers.
I stuck each sucker in
its own pot, soaked the soil well, and then cut off the tops. (I
took the photo above before I pulled out the clippers.) I have
high hopes that, if I keep the blueberry suckers in partial shade on the
porch and water them regularly, we'll have three new blueberry plants
to add to our collection this winter.
I'd be curious to hear
from others who have planted out rabbiteye blueberry suckers. Do
you have a method for making the suckers develop roots while attached to
the mother plant, or do you snip and pot like I did?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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