partnering pine trees with blue berries.

I am currently planning my food forest for my new property. The area that are that I'm planting is full of old growth and pine and oak. It's not a closed canopy but the entire understory is over grown with trifoliate orange, cherokee rose, yaupon, and chinese privet.

I was thinking about trying to plant blueberries around the pine trees. The thought is that the pine trees provide a more acidic environment in the soil that would benefit the blue berries.

Has anyone done this before that can share their outcome or maybe if it failed what they think went wrong?

I have both blueberry bushes and pine trees on my property. While they aren't planted together, I mulch my blueberries with pine needles. The blueberry bushes do very well with that.

Blueberries need a lot of sun, I would be worried they would be shaded out and not fruit well. Mulching with the pine needles is great, and using some of the soil from your pine forest when planting the blueberries too

I have blueberries with ponderosa and knobcone pines to the north and west. They have a high, sparse canopy, so their shade is dappled at most, and generally only at the hottest times of day (afternoon), and year (midsummer when the sun is directly above). They are also in a place at 1700ft elevation with very sunny summers, so light is excessively available here for most things. I’d put blueberries in full sun in a colder, less sunny climate.

Forrest King wrote:Blueberries need a lot of sun, I would be worried they would be shaded out and not fruit well. Mulching with the pine needles is great, and using some of the soil from your pine forest when planting the blueberries too

I see this said a lot with blueberries and it confuses me. Where I used to live in central Virginia, there was a Civil War battlefield hike, with the trail edged almost completely with wild blueberries. Using proper foraging etiquette (i.e., leave a lot of it behind), and being very circumspect about the actual gathering, I was able to forage about a pint of blueberries on a 4 mile hike. The wild blueberries seemed to have no trouble growing in the forested trail - it wasn't a heavy canopy, but certainly many tall trees overhead. Granted, the berries were small, but I figured that was due to them being wild. And they tasted delicious, nice an tart with a good sweetness to them.

Anyway, I always thought blueberries were understory shrubs and that you only needed a massive amount of sunlight if you were growing blueberries commercially.

(Please forgive a first-time poster if I'm wrong!)

I suspect the amount of shade blueberries will like depends on your lattitude and climate, as well as the variety of blueberry. I'm just starting to grow blueberries here, and I am trying to give them as much sun as possible. My summers are damp and cool, and I'm quite far North (57.4 degrees ish) so the sun, when we see it, is less intense. The local bilberry (another Vaccinium species) is quite happy fruiting in partial shade of pine forests on the mainland.

As to conifers making the soil acidic, turns out that's not accurate. Redhawk explains it here. The conifers will hold on to acidity that was already there, or that is introduced.  He explains how to do that at the link.

Nancy Reading wrote:I suspect the amount of shade blueberries will like depends on your lattitude and climate, as well as the variety of blueberry. I'm just starting to grow blueberries here, and I am trying to give them as much sun as possible. My summers are damp and cool, and I'm quite far North (57.4 degrees ish) so the sun, when we see it, is less intense. The local bilberry (another Vaccinium species) is quite happy fruiting in partial shade of pine forests on the mainland.

That does make sense, thanks! Virginia tends to have hot, humid summers which probably accounts for them being a bit easier to grow in shade.