guildfordcycads

I live in the limestone state. My soil has a high pH, coming in a little over 8 when tested (twice!).

I planted 3 blueberry bushes (different cultivars) in large containers but would really like replace the ugly, overgrown evergreens in my front yard with them. I know that amending native soil with sulfur can take years to lower pH but then it has to be maintained constantly with temporary solutions like vinegar or citric acid (my go-to) and sulfur because the soil will always push towards its natural condition.

I don’t have the energy to continuously fight nature.

If I do a raised bed the with a 12-18″ height (the open bottom kind that sit on the native soil), and I start out with soil that is ideal for blueberry bushes, will that raised bed soil pH eventually increase as well because it is connecting to and becoming part of the natural soil? If so, will the struggle to manage it be just as difficult of a fight? Will I have to be replacing soil yearly or just topping it off?

What about the roots that will likely grow into the native soil… will that make the blueberries unproductive as if I had planted them straight into the pH 8 soil? Will it make them less productive or comparably productive as keeping them in a large container where i can control the pH but the roots won’t have the same space and their size is more likely to be smaller?

I wouldn’t want bushes planted in a container much higher than 12-18″ because they will be in front of a window. I know their roots are shallow but are they shallow enough to not push 12″ into the native soil? Or would the shallow roots in the bed soil be enough to sustain fruit even if there are deeper roots in the higher pH soil?

https://i.redd.it/i2l6y1imydof1.gif

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of life depends on centralized systems — banks, supermarkets, even the online spaces where we talk. All of it can be switched off by someone else.

I’m exploring alternatives: decentralized chat, community-owned networks, censorship-resistant publishing, and ways to build parallel systems that actually belong to us.

As a small first step, I’ve started a project called Sensorless — an uncensorable blog + encrypted chatroom. Curious if anyone else here is working on similar ideas or wants to connect around building systems we control ourselves.