On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 13:27:18 +0100, "Bigus"
wrote:

"david taylor" wrote in message
...
Bilberries require very acid soil. I think they are similar to heather in
that they can only take nutrient in via a microfungal population on their
roots.
They used to-maybe still grow on Waldridge Fell near where I lived many
years ago in County Durham. Altitude only about 500ft, rainfall c25ins
year.
I think the main requirement is an impoverished peaty soil pH around 4.5.
I live in Devon now via Cheshire and am growing blueberries-billberries
are
nice, but will be a lot of effort for not very much. The blueberries are
in
a raised bed brick filled with peat /leaf mold and wood chippings. I feed
the blueberries with ericaceous fertiliser and mulch them heavily with
wood
and bark chippings, which I found out later were recommended. I haven't
checked the pH. The underlying soil is a clay pH 6.5.

Thanks for the advice.. I found a place - www.dorset-blueberry.co.uk - that
supplies blueberry bushes of many different varieties and there are some
crossbreeds that apparently have a taste and anti-oxidant level reasonably
close to that of bilberries, so I'm thinking of egtting some of those in
autumn when their next batch is ready. When you say you have a raised bed
filled with peat/leaf mold, what exactly do you mean? That is, do you
effectively have a layer of the peat/leaf-mold on top of your normal (clay)
soil, with nothing separating the two? If so, how thick is the peat/mold
layer?

The dunes in the Friesian Islands, especially Texel, are covered in
bilberries/blueberries. Needless to say the dunes are not covered in
peat/leaf mold.