Florida Blueberries

We don’t grow blueberries in our yard.  I’ve always been told that Southwest Florida isn’t a good place to even try.  It looks like that might be changing though.  We visited a local blueberry u-pick farm this week that had us singing and dancing with buckets of dee-licous blueberries.  Yay… we don’t have to go to Georgia to have fresh blueberries!

We never knew picking blueberries was so much fun! My kids love to pick stuff off plants.

My 5-year-old took this photo. I asked them to hold the camera for one minute…

Blueberries are perfect for little hands to pick!

I have a local friend that grows her blueberries in containers so she can control the ph.   She uses a 50/50 mixture of peat and perlite in her containers.  Her backyard plants give her family lots of berries every year.  Ideally, blueberry bushes like acidic soil with a ph of around 5 and most of our soil has a ph of 8-9.  However, the hundreds of blueberry bushes we saw at our local u-pick were planted in the ground and loaded with berries.   I’m not sure what varieties they’re growing, but we love the flavor.  Click here for a list of blueberry varieties suggested for Florida by the University of Florida.  Click here  for an excellent slide show by UF on growing blueberries in South Florida.

Our local blueberries are only around for a short time in April and May.   Check out Patty’s Patch if you’re in Southwest Florida and want to pick some fresh, local blueberries.

Patty’s Patch Blueberry Farm (U-Pick) in Southwest Florida.

This was just the beginning. We filled two buckets. I have big plans for our blueberries.

Heavenly Florida blueberries in our bucket.

Come grow with us!

Loring’s Lei

Loring has been asking me to make a necklace out of flowers with her for quite some time.  I always promise, but don’t follow through.  Yesterday I dropped what I was doing and said, “Let’s make that lei”.

We collected a bowl full of our edible jasmine flowers.  They have a perfect little hole in them when they’re picked.  I threaded a needle for Loring and let her do the rest.  She had no trouble sewing the flowers into a necklace all by herself.

Check out the Crafting Chicks blog for an adorable lei project that can be done with straws and paper with kids.

The jasminum sambac flowers are perfect for stringing a homemade lei. This is the ‘Maid of Orleans’ variety of jasmine.

Loring is sewing her lei and singing gleefully.  Although, she was really concentrating when I took the photo.

Loring and her homemade Lei.

Sometimes we really do need to stop and smell the flowers!

Come grow with us!