Visit to a soft fruit farm on Sunday

[bikermike]

as part of Open Farm Day (this time every year), we visited a farm in Surry that is apparently the UK's largest blueberry farm.

Factoids that may of interest
1) they grow everything in medium not the ground. In this case coir. They then use liquid feed and measure the run-off to determine what's happened
2) they don't use insecticides, they rely on beneficial insects
3) bumble bees are something like 3 times more efficient at pollinating blueberries than honey bees. They buy in boxes of bumble bees
4) the main pest is a kind of sawfly from SE Asia, and they use traps for that like wasp traps
5) growing in tubs at hip-height reduces losses by 20% compared to low planting
6) the most popular temporary tattoo was pictures of robots.
7) they didn't seem bothered by squirrels or birds "they don't take enough to be a problem"
8) I think my homegrown ones taste better...

[fluffybunnyuk]

Do they do cuttings?

[TrixC]

I’m surprised they don’t find birds to be a problem, before I netted my blueberries birds took every single one

[nickdub]

I’m surprised they don’t find birds to be a problem, before I netted my blueberries birds took every single one

Depends on where you are I think - a number of remarks about sharing soft fruits with birds on here recently - if I tried that where I live on the edge of a wood, it would be 100% for the critters and none for me - even with netting and other measures I often lose over 50% to the wild life.