North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>]

At 05:29 PM 2/13/2005 -0800, Lon wrote:
> In one of the older POMONAs there is an article from (name escapes me) who 
> studied Vaccinium arboreum, so called "farkleberry" of the South. It was 
> sufficiently tolerant of alkaline soils that northern highbush blueberries 
> could be grafted on  the species and they would survive and produce when 
> they would die on their own roots.  One old timer apparently had a patch 
> of such grafted berries that was 25 years old and in good production.  I 
> have a piece of V. arboreum grafted on highbush blueberries, and it's 
> quite interesting.  I had thought of crossing the two, but the V. arboreum 
> doesn't bloom until the highbush types have ripe fruit.

Dan Hemenway, of Barking Frogs Permaculture, down at Sparr, FL was doing 
some work grafting named-variety blueberries onto the native Farkleberry 
plants growing wild on his place - I sent him some cuttings a number of 
years back - but I've not had a 'progress report' from Dan in a while, so I 
don't know how well, if at all, the northern highbush types did for him 
down there.

Lucky