Blueberries

Blueberries are little-known for their Latin name, "Cyanococcus Vaccinium" because that name feels like a real hot-button in today's political climate, and also because "blueberry" pretty much wraps it up. They are tasty, they make smoothies look delicious, and they are a super-food: a classification which is very significant.

Blueberries are also rich in antioxidants, which is something people get really jazzed about when they're trying to sell you something. In all seriousness though, antioxidants eliminate something called free radicals, which are yipped up molecules that need to take a chill pill before they break something, like your DNA. You can read more about antioxidants here, but the long and short is that they're good but you don't need to buy anything expensive to obtain them. Eat more fruits and vegetables.

"BUT WAIT!" (you'll say) "Didn't blueberries peak at over 8 dollars a pound in fiscal year 2015/16, and at 6 dollars a pound in fiscal years 2017-2019? How can I follow your advice to eat more fruits and vegetables when they're so pricey? I'm too thrifty for this highfalutin' diet! Am I doomed to have my genetic code rent in twain by these over-caffeinated free radicals?"

Well, nerd, thanks for asking. You can grow the berries. In addition to their health benefits, blueberries are allegedly very easy to grow, but they do have some fussy predilections that are important to get right at the onset of your growing. There are two important elements that blueberries need to thrive according to my two weeks of research sorting between the facts and the opinions. Much like filthy degenerate hippies, blueberries like soft, fluffy, loamy ground and acid.

two blueberries in their natural habitat

In order to create loamy, acidic ground for your blueberries, it can help to start with peat moss, which is soft, loamy, and acidic. Unfortunately, however, it is not likely to stay that way, especially if you have hard tap water (hard, for our purposes, means alkaline, or base, or having a pH above 7) according to this brilliant article. In fact, there are many ideas about how to lower pH that this same blogger tackles in his aptly named "garden myths" blog, including pine needles, coffee grounds, and composting in general. In his general article on soil acidity, he advises adding elemental sulfur to the soil. His opinion is supported by Michigan State University, which highly recommends integrating the sulfur with the soil. I'll be doing just that when I start up my blueberries.

My plan is to plant my blueberries in these growing containers and then bury the growing containers in the soil around to protect the roots during the bitter cold New York winters. The containers will serve to maintain the soil acidity around the blueberries. I will incorporate sulfur and peat moss with the dirt I dug up to make the soil a little fluffier and more acidic. I'll be using this sulfur and testing the soil using this soil tester. (Disclaimer: All the links in this article are to Amazon, and if you use them to buy the products, I will get a portion of the proceeds. The price for you will not change! Think of it as a way to use Amazon while giving Jeff Bezos less of your money)

QUICK FACTS:
Blueberries like a soil pH of 4.5-4.8. They NEED a soil pH under 5.5.
Blueberries should be planted 4-5 feet away from each other.
Blueberries like full sun.
Blueberries need about 2 feet diameter bags to grow properly.

FINANCIAL ANALYSIS:
In an attempt to maintain self-sufficiency, all our plants should be providing a return on our investment. To this end, I want to analyze our inputs and outputs, and then compare that return on investment to the S&P 500 (over its lifetime)

The blueberries I purchased cost $70 dollars, the soil tester cost $10, the sulfur cost $23, and the bags cost $22. I'll also purchase some peat moss for I'm guessing about $25. Our total cost of startup is $150.

I found frozen blueberries at Walmart for $2.50 a pound. I think my blueberries will be better than that, but it's a good baseline to assess against. The lowest estimates for blueberry production per bush are about 15 lbs/year. With my 6 plants, I can expect 90 lbs of blueberries at peak production. Peak production will take 2 years to attain, and then I can expect production to continue for at least 20 years. Over 20 years, at 90 lbs/year, my $150 dollar investment will yield me 1,620 lbs of blueberries, at an estimated value of $4,050.00. This is an annualized Return on Investment (ROI) of 17.91%, which is a little more than double the lifetime return of the S&P 500.

There's more to be gained, also. It's possible to clone blueberries with cuttings, and further increase your return. That's a topic for another article.

In these times of economic turmoil, knowing that such tangible and functional returns are available is a tremendous comfort to me. I hope it's a comfort to you as well, and I hope you're inspired to grow blueberries.

If you have any questions, or any suggestions for follow up articles or unrelated articles you'd like to see on this blog, please leave me a comment below, or comment on the Facebook article you probably found this from. I'd love to hear from you.

ground floor

When I bought a house to renovate and turn into a rental, more than half the money spent was to comply with regulations. About half of these were reasonable, and I would have spent that money anyways to make a safe house for my tenants. The other half were more dubious. One concern was allegedly that the windows could have lead paint, but the all-wise regulators would not allow a lead test to be done if there was any chipped or cracked paint anywhere on the frame of the window. The chipped paint of note for our window was inaccessible unless you uninstalled the window, but the windows were old, and liable to break with that much man-handling. We were cornered into nearly doubling our rehab budget to fix windows that may or may not have had lead paint, without being able to test for the lead paint in the first place.

It seems wherever you want to go these days, bureaucracy follows you. No matter what your endeavor is, there's some pencil-pushing do-nothing looking over your shoulder, tapping their foot and shaking their head. Invariably, my work is deficient somehow, and usually the deficiency is non-consequential minutiae.  Working as a nurse, I spend easily a third of my day filling out meaningless paperwork to comply with the latest mandates. Every breath you draw requires a government form filled out in triplicate, signed by a notary, blessed by a priest, and with a permission slip from your mommy.

This blog is not supposed to be a whine fest. Sorry.

Instead of sitting and stewing in my contempt for the world of government and politics, my endeavor in my spare time has been to educate myself in such a way as to provide an alternative for myself and my family. I've become somewhat smitten with the work of authors like Joel Salatin, and the principles of permaculture and homesteading. I like the idea of setting up symbiotic systems that produce food and grow off of one another. Learning and adapting to the law of nature actually sounds like a pleasant (though undoubtedly challenging) process, and it's a problem I'm enthusiastic to wrestle with.

Moving from my home in the Rochester Inner City to a farm that could theoretically sustain my entire family is a bit of a pivot, and it's not something that we're ready for financially, but in the mean time I want to use the time I have to learn what I can about the processes of growing food. This summer, I intend to start 6 4'x8' raised beds in my backyard, plant some blueberry bushes, and continue using the hydroponic garden that I've started in the basement.

This blog will serve as a series of reports on the various specific projects I am researching or attempting. I want to create profiles for the various fruit and nut trees, for the perennial vegetables, for the annuals, and maybe even eventually for the animals that I might want on our homestead. I want this blog to serve as a synthesized hub of the information that I would have loved to have right now. I want to create useful, actionable tips for anyone who wants to follow this path. I may also provide some updates on our progress for fun and as a diary of our successes and failures, but I don't want the blog to be a hot-air ode to what a special boy I am.

The following is a list of the projects I have already started or that I intend to start.

Started:
create a raised bed garden in the backyard. 5 beds.
Start a patch (patch? grove? orchard? parliament?) of blueberries
Continue a hydroponic garden that I've started in the basement.

Intend to start/tentative plans:
when our family has obtained a property, I intend to start a food forest of perennial vegetation in a permaculture style. I want to focus on fruit and nut trees, since I want the process to require minimal inputs. This is a huge tangled endeavor that will doubtless provide millions of rabbit trails, both literal and figurative, to follow as I research.

My next post will be information about blueberry bushes.