North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Doreen Howard" <doreenh@ticon.net>]

Ginda,
Try ammonium sulfate for a quick pH change.  Aluminum sulfate takes some
time to work.  Try scratching in a tablespoon of ammonium sulfate around
each plant and then watering it in.  My newly planted blueberries looked
very yellow, too.  Even though I planted them in heavily amended soil (lots
of peat, etc.) and sprinkled aluminum sulfate over the ground, the plants
looked bad.  About 4 days after applying ammonium sulfate, I could see the
difference in plants.  The tiny new leaves are dark green and the old growth
doesn't look as bad.
Doreen Howard

-----Original Message-----
From: Ginda Fisher <ginda@concentric.net>
To: NAFEX <nafex@egroups.com>
Date: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 6:57 PM
Subject: [nafex] request advice for yellow blueberries


>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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