'Mini Blues' was released as a new cultivar in 2016 by the cooperative USDA-ARS/OSU breeding program. It produces small fruit (1/2 to 1/3 typical blueberry size) with excellent aromatic flavor and high sugar content on vigorous bushes with good fruit yields. 'Mini Blues' are perfect for baking, beverage making, and other processing uses because of their small size and intensity of flavor and color. Click here for the original cultivar release paper (original variety name was 'Baby Blues' but this was later changed).
Because of the plant's growth habit, this variety is time-consuming to prune using standard practices, so our research program planted a trial in 2015 to study how a variety of time-saving pruning techniques would impact the plants over time (click here for a paper and here for a presentation of results). We found that leaving plants unpruned for 5 harvest years (plants were pruned during establishment to remove fruit buds and create a good bush shape) maintained good yield, and while berry size got slightly smaller over the years, was still acceptable. However, the unpruned bushes need to be renovated--or cut to the ground--after that time to re-invigorate the canes, thus losing a year of yield.
Plants could also be pruned quickly by removing 1-3 larger canes from the base of the plant each winter, which maintained similar yields, berry size, and quality as using typical pruning methods while saving about 83% of the time to prune.
In Winter 2022, the unpruned plants were renovated, so there was no harvest in 2022 and a small crop from those plants in 2023. By 2024, there was no difference in yield between the renovated plants and plants that had been continuously pruned. We will be reviewing the economics of these various pruning methods in 2024-25 to show the cost-benefit analysis based on pruning labor and fruit yield. Stay tuned for more details!