Hello all! new here!

Hello everyone!
A little about myself and my family. My family and I are currently on our 5th year in our newest home and have been building up our garden year after year, I work my best to keep it as a permaculture, but stick with organic at minimum, our main vegetable garden is 40x80, a new 30x 10 vegetable plot an additional 15x15 raspberry bush plot (well established) , a 10x 10 blueberry bush plot with 2 year old plants still living but not doing as well as well as we'd prefer, (4 plants), then I built 2x 3'x3'x3' raised hügelkulturs raised beds for raspberries (they had other plants in mind when built). when we moved into the home we planted 2 Havana peach, 2 dwarf Havana peach, 2 Honeycrisp apple, and 2 cocktail fruit and 2 nectarine fruit trees I also grow.... other plants but ill keep those to the forum I am a moderator on regarding those, although they relate to some of my ambitions and questions with edible plants. we Just purchased 4 more blueberry bushes on their way now, and plan to pick up 2 cherry trees, 2 more honey crisp apple trees, 2 more nectarine as well as additional blueberry varieties. With the "other" plants i do indoor and outdoor and over the years i have accumulated 1x 4x8 tent, 2x 4x4 tents, 1x 3x3 tent, 1x 2x4 tent and 1x 2x2 tents all set up and ready to use as needed. Some tents were fully sponsored but contracts have completed and can now be used for other projects,  one of my goals with some of these tents will be to use as propagation and cloning tents.

The 2x4 tent i use mainly for microgreen treys, (i also have 50 zinnias started in it as well) along with some aloe plants.

i have a fairly large amount of successful cloning experience with... the other plants and can achieve a 95-99% success rate over the years.

I typically start twice as many seedlings as i plan to use, (currently have approx. 450 seedling started and germinated for this season. I generally use Johnnysselectedseeds.com as my preferred seed supplier and have always had excellent results from growth to disease resistance as well as overall yield) these are started on a 2x4x8' rack utilizing 2 sets of 4' 8 bar sets of 20w barrina grow bars i will share pictures of in my next post.

Our excess seedlings and excess vegetables beyond what is needed for canning and freezing get sold at the road (seedlings as well) and over the years we have built a small, but consistent customer base for both we talk to our customers frequently and we probably give away more than we sell (we like to help others). I have been wanting to get into cloning and selling blueberry bushes and raspberry bushes and would like some helpful tips and hints on the best soil mixes, feeds, container sizes etc. to achieve the best success.

We live a "homesteading" life as it pertains to vegetables and would like to expand on the fruit aspect of it, meat is bough at local ranches, my wife has been baking and selling sourdough to a small close knit circle for years and we get notes left regarding out vegetable seedlings and vegetables we sell at our roadside stand. I feel we can do more for our community by propagating and cloning berry bushes etc. and am very ambitious to get the project going, all the tents mentioned above are up, have lights, humidity and temp controllers, are all carbon filtered and have various high end lights ready at the flip of the switch, which id like to utilize to begin the berry bush farm goal. 2 of the tents have 30 gallon pots (2 in the 4x8 and one in one of the 4x4's, one 4x4 has a 60 gallon pot, all are organic based utilizing mainly build-a-soil amendments and soils, all have 200-400 worms in them (a worm, farm may be in the works as well)

If anyone is interested in discussing any of the ventures I mentioned above please leave a comment and your opinions, questions and any ideas you may have that could help. I am excited to start my journey in this community! i have many homesteads around me and i live in the heart of the fruit and grape vineyards in my area in western NY, i am surrounded by them in 30 miles in every direction and we love it. We have a large well known creek and dam in my backyard known for its salmon and trout runs down below the dam. My backyard is a very sandy loom mixture in the back end along the "ancient" creek bed, and when one side was converted to the large garden a 10" layer of dark leaf organic compost was used to establish the main garden, we use a heavy woven plastic sheeting used for landscaping in the garden (yes plastic, we know lol), as a weed barrier for our main vegetable garden areas which have worked excellent over the past few years.

Please leave any questions that may help our venture to begin cloning and propagating berry bushes and any beginner tips you may have, especially relating to indoor grow tent cloning! For any that read this all I thank you!

A pic of one shelf of the current seedlings started for this season

A few older garden pics from the past few years

Welcome! That's a solid setup you've got going. The blueberries struggling at 2 years is pretty common, they're fussy about soil pH and most garden soil is nowhere near acidic enough for them. Worth checking if that's the issue before anything else.

Joao Winckler wrote:Welcome! That's a solid setup you've got going. The blueberries struggling at 2 years is pretty common, they're fussy about soil pH and most garden soil is nowhere near acidic enough for them. Worth checking if that's the issue before anything else.

Thank you for the welcome! I really enjoy growing basically anything that’ll take in my area (zone 6b)

I’ll check the PH on them soon I added some acidic espmoa plants feed to granules to the area around them all yesterday while it was raining, and the few I Have in 20 gallon pots, went ahead and took some raspberry plant cuttings today and stuck 3 per 1 gallon pot, just 6” cuttings, snipped off bottom 2 nodes on each and buries with 4-6” left above soil, did 4 pots so I can spread them a bit more, neighbors were growing over the fence so I took some snips 😆 we share our plants and our harvests, I have some of his in our main raspberry garden already from last year and they are nice and leafy already along with our own, I’ll grab some pics in a bit. Was a morning of mechanic work on the car so I was a bit behind lol.

We really love blueberries as well so getting some nice hearty bushes is our goal, I would have taken some cuttings off those too but I think they are too small to take from yet.

How do blueberry plants do in a tent? I have one available to use I could use to really bush out the 4 I have coming

Hers a bit of where we are this spring so far

Along with the 4x8 little hardening off shed I threw together with scraps from mine and my neighbors yard for plants in the spring

welcome Mike, you've got a great space and I look forward to seeing what your garden looks like as the year progresses. Sounds like you're in a great little corner of the world.

Tereza Okava wrote:welcome Mike, you've got a great space and I look forward to seeing what your garden looks like as the year progresses. Sounds like you're in a great little corner of the world.

Thank you for the welcome! We love our area, the back behind our house was a main focal point when we bought it, it’s a steep cliff down to the creek it’s the top side of a dam, over the past 3 years we’ve seen a large increase of bald eagles flying up and down the dam and our local paper has been talking about them a lot, the kids love seeing them come over the house,  we get a ton of swans, ducks, Canadian geese, Comarant’s (an invasive species that decimates local fish populations) were located just a few miles from the south shore of Lake Ontario our creek in the back is a main tributary. Just spent the morning cutting g up trees that came down over the winter.

I’ve been trying to maintain some maple trees in 1 gallon pots to try and make some Bonzai trees, I just really enjoy growing overall and love trying new techniques, im always welcome to new ideas and can’t wait to try more. Anytime I see something I haven’t tried I absolutely have to do it

Hers what it looks like out behind the fence, the maple leaves I collect and compost in the orange compost area, the pile of leaves is what we raked out of the yard along the dance this spring

When I plant our veggie seedlings I mix in about 20-25% composted maple leaves as well as whole leaves, when i plant in the garden pictured above I dig out an approximately 5 gallon sized hole in each cutout, amend the soil with the leaves and usually Jobes organic and then plant the seedlings, the trellises with the 1.5” PVC tops stand at 8’ tall ground to PVC, this year I’ll be adding in 10’ heavy T-Posts to maintain the weight of the plants, last year they were sagging down over a foot in the centers with the heavy load of tomatoes late season, damn heavy, I get very few weeds and even with 80-90f days for weeks ata time with the plastic I normally do not need to water all season and maintain healthy tomato plants reaching 7-8’ tall, I normally mainline them and use a combination of vertical trellising as well as Florida weave techniques to get very hearty harvests. We normally can up about 200 quarts of crushed tomatoes and only make fresh sauce as needed from them (reduces the workload during harvest season). The kids love fresh tomato soup the wife makes over any commercial canned soups. (We also homeschool so the kids also learn the growing skills as well as maintain the roadside stand all spring and summer)

The new garden strip has been covered since last summer to kill off any grass (was all yard previously) we plan to add an additional 30-40 Roma tomato plants down this strip this year ustilizing the same methods above, the far end has the 4x blueberry bushes we planted last year.

And we found this little snapper on my lower deck about 30 minutes ago, we plan to bring him down to the dam tomorrow morning and let him go

Can’t wait for the 4 new blueberry varieties to arrive, I plan to put them into the 4x 20 gallon pots when they come in so I can start taking cuttings off them once they start pushing new nodes

Got the seedlings rockin and ready to go out

New garden strip has been prepared and has 30 new holes cut out, main garden is ready to roll. Has a frost 2 days ago and it should be the last, looks like mid to high 40’s in the forecast so I may start planting this upcoming weekend

What’s everyone else’s planting plan for zone 6B