Swamp Blueberry

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Video: Swamp Blueberry

Video: Swamp Blueberry
Video: Swamp People: Bruce Bakes Blueberry Cobbler | History 2024, May
Swamp Blueberry
Swamp Blueberry
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Swamp blueberry (Latin Vaccinium uliginosum) - perennial deciduous shrubs of small size, representing the Heather family. This type of blueberry is also called marsh blueberry.

Description

Swamp blueberry is a highly branched deciduous shrub that grows in height from thirty centimeters to one meter. Its erect branches are cylindrical in shape, and the bark is painted in dark gray or brownish shades. As for the shoots, they are always green.

Rigid alternate leaves of the plant are always very smooth and rather small - as a rule, their width does not exceed 2.4 cm, and their length is 3 cm. All leaves are located on very short petioles and are distinguished by a lanceolate shape. Slightly less often, you can meet plants with obovate leaves. The blunt tops of blueberry leaves are equipped with either solid or slightly curving edges downward, as well as sparse stalked glands. Above, the leaf blades are painted in bluish-greenish shades and are covered with a waxy coating that is clearly visible to the eye, and from below they are slightly lighter and endowed with rather prominent veins.

The drooping flowers, the length of which in most cases reaches six centimeters, are distinguished by a characteristic jug-bell-shaped shape. Pedicels are usually longer than flowers. Each peduncle is endowed with a pair of greenish scarious unequal bracts, reaching a length of two to five millimeters. And all the flowers are located at the tops of last year's branches. The flower cups are formed by miniature rounded sepals in the amount of four to five pieces, and the whitish jug-like corollas have limbs of short teeth bent outward. The ovaries of flowers are usually four- or five-celled, stamens - about eight to ten pieces in each, and the columns are always much longer than the stamens. This berry culture blooms from May to July, and its flowering lasts only ten to twelve days.

Blueberry is an insect pollinated crop - it is pollinated by butterflies, ants and bees. And the first berries ripen approximately forty to fifty days after the blueberries bloom.

It is noteworthy that a fairly decent part of the buds and ovaries of swamp blueberries (from 30 to 70%) fall off, and there can be a great many reasons for this: some of them turn out to be underdeveloped, some are eaten by harmful caterpillars, etc.

Blueberry berries can have a wide variety of shapes, but most often you can observe oblong blue berries with a characteristic bluish bloom, reaching a length of about 1.2 cm. The skin of the berries is always very thin, and the flesh is watery and greenish. The average weight of each berry is about 0.8 g. Inside the blueberry you can find a lot of light brown seeds with a bizarre crescent shape.

Growing

Despite the fact that marsh blueberries produce a truly incredible amount of seeds, propagating them with their help can be quite problematic. The seeds of this culture are able to germinate only under a number of conditions (lack of direct sunlight, rather high humidity, as well as disturbances in the grass and moss cover).

Blueberry is a very frost-hardy plant, and the life expectancy of its bushes can reach one hundred years. In nature, it begins to bear fruit when it reaches eleven or eighteen years old, while a couple of hundred berries are almost always collected from each bush without much difficulty.

The aboveground parts of this culture are often affected by a variety of pathogenic fungi (about two dozen of their varieties can be found on blueberries), as well as by harmful sawfly insects.

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