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Yes, the blueberry is a strong, woody bush that does not require support. It is my understanding from the limited reading I've done so far that they can/will get about 8 ft. tall. We have a friend who has some old bushes and they are around 7 ft. tall and quite large in diameter, but he has no clue what variety they are. We've bought 9 bushes in 6 different varieties, but I'm going to keep the varieties together and add to them over the next couple of years.

The blueberry bushes that we purchased are 2 year old plants and I read that production begins at 3-4 years. I don't expect anything at all this year and maybe not next year, but we consider all of this fruit planting a long-term project anyway.

Let me know how the landscape fabric works out for you. It completely changed my gardening life.

You are certainly right about the landscape fabric.

3 years ago I bought a 10 X 100’ roll - mowed the grass really close and put it down with ground staples. I have tried several crops on it and it works beautifully. This past year I put 200 tomatoes without staking. Harvested about 2 tons of tomatoes - next year I will stake them - sun scald was pretty bad with them spread out.

It looks like it will last at least 5 years. I put drip irrigation tape down next to the plant row and put it on a timer - can’t get any better or easier. I bought a 15 X 300’ roll this last fall and will be adding that for this summer. As I get older, the tilling, weeding, and mulching is getting harder on these old bones. ;) This is something I will definitely expand on and will be trying several other crops this year. Need to work up a rotation to keep disease and pests down. It warms the soil much earlier and gives me at least a two week jump on the crop (I always rush planting too early and have to replant sometimes anyway).

The roll cost $389 that with a 5 year life would be $77.80 per year for a 45X100’ weedless garden and no tilling. Or, about 2 cents a square foot per year

I only use it for transplants - haven’t worked out how to use it for direct seeded items yet.

You can see the first use I put the groundcover to in the following picture.

Every gardener has to try out new ideas, right?

Well, this is one of my great ideas to grow lots and lots of strawberries in a limited space.

Strawberries did beautifully, in blossom and loaded with small fruit. Of course this appeared to be an ideal way to grow 500 Strawberry plants in just a 10 X 30 sq. ft. area.

Best of all, the berries would be nice and clean, and I could pick them mostly standing up.

Neighbors were commenting on how neat it looked and how great an idea...

I could almost taste the strawberry shortcake - the hours of drilling, fitting and building the towers faded into history.

Then,

One Sunday morning...

I went out to check on those berries with hopes that a couple of them had turned red - the sweetness was in my mouth even before I went out the door.........

Oh, NO!

Our dear dairy goat was in goat heaven - she was standing on her hind legs finishing off some of the berries on the top layers and the sight was sickening.... How did she get out THIS time...

Here is what I had...

Roots dried out and 80% of the berry plants shot!

This is how I then moved on and started planting on the groundcover for other crops.

As I have stated in another post, 200 tomato plants this past year and hundreds and hundreds of pounds of tomatoes. Canned a whole lot of them, dried a bunch ate all I could, gave family, friends and neighbors all they wanted.

So, I guess the cardinal rule in gardening is try, try again.

This year I will be expanding this considerably - no tilling, NO WEEDING, earlier planting - Life is good again. :-)