North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Ginda Fisher <ginda@concentric.net>]

I have several young half-high blueberries bushes, planted last spring
and the preceding fall.  Three of them look rather yellow this spring,
with some red towards the leaf ends.  One of each of my three cultivars,
bluesky, northblue, and st. cloud, looks tired.  The others look okay,
with perhaps a little red.  The leaves look healthy otherwise, with no
signs of insect damage or disease.  I put a lot of peat moss into the
soil before I planted them, but the yellow ones are located where I may
have put a bit less - I wouldn't swear either way.  All of the bushes
were mulched with partially rotted oak leaves last fall.  I also threw
some hollytone around them early this spring.  Last year, the same
bushes looked a little yellow later in the season, but not so bad.  Last
year I was so astonished that the bushes flowered that I let them fruit
to see what would happen - they all bore a small crop.

I thought the problem might be pH, and I bought a pH meter.  It read
7.0.  I tried it in various other parts of the garden, and it said 7.0. 
I put it in a glass of water with quite a bit of vinegar and it still
said 7.0.  So I gave up on science, and went back to the hardware store
and asked for some sulfur to acidify my soil.  All they had was aluminum
sulfate, so I bought a small bag, and sprinkled enough of it over my
blueberry patch to lower the pH 1 or 2 points, according to the
directions.  (More near the yellowest ones, less near the greenest
ones.)

That was a week and a lot of rain ago.  The blueberries that looked okay
look marginally better, but the yellow ones are still pretty yellow.

Should I wait longer and see what happens?  Should I add more aluminum
sulfate?  Try another hardware store?  Or is the problem likely to be
something other than pH?

Thanks,
Ginda Fisher
Eastern Massachusetts, zone 6

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