Beating the Blueberry Blues

This is my third year growing blueberries in containers. I started a few in the ground, and though I thought I was adding a lot of peat moss, the gray sand swallowed it up in an instant and I never could get the soil acidic enough for the plants to thrive. So I moved them into containers in a nice sunny spot next to my garden. For soil I mixed sphagnum peat moss, perlite, and vermiculite, and I regularly toss on coffee grounds along with a bit of balanced fertilizer. The plants are ever so much happier in their new homes.

The spring after the move was 2013, and though the scrawny plants were still recovering from their in-ground struggles, I still collected a few encouraging handfuls of the tasty fruit. I bought a couple more, bringing my collection to a half-dozen. Eagerly I awaited the blueberry season of 2014, but I was not the only one. My squirrel population had discovered them, and throughout the spring they grabbed the blueberries the instant they showed a trace of color. My harvest: zero. Worse yet, I had to stake up plants tilted in their pots from the pests climbing in them, and one plant even succumbed to the damage.

Various acquaintances told me about concoctions of strong flavors that would supposedly repel the marauders, and I toyed with buying a commercial product that supposedly intimidates them with the smell of animal blood. But I figured that anyone who had really found an effective repellent would have made enough to buy out Apple, Microsoft, Google, Walmart, and several small countries by now. So what to do?

My garage has a 10-feet wide concrete pad along the south-facing rear side, a natural spot for containers. Surrounding this is an open area, unlike the garden which is ringed with oak canopy. With all the hawks in my neighborhood, a prudent squirrel ought to be reluctant to cross that open area and hang around on the very exposed concrete pad munching blueberries. So at the start of spring, I hefted the blueberry containers onto my wagon and wheeled them two at a time to the pad.

I know I'm tempting fate bragging about it, but the voracious critters haven't figured it out yet, and every morning these days I'm picking a bowl of delicious unsprayed blueberries. My next decision will be whether to move the plants back to the garden for the rest of the year, or leave them in their new spot. I'm leaning toward moving them back, just to be more confusing. Wish me luck!