Theme Gardens & Blueberry Farm
Come and enjoy a brilliant family day out at our 17-acre blueberry farm full of fun activities for the kids. We are in Steels Creek, near Healesville and less than 10 minutes north of Yarra Glen (an hour’s drive from Melbourne ).
We are open during the summer months when our blueberries are ripe and you can buy them from our packing shed.
Have a leisurely picnic and feast on the juiciest of blueberries, then stroll around our gardens, meet our ever-expanding family of dinosaurs, hunt for gold coins on Treasure Island and check out our new Miniatures Garden too!!
PLEASE NOTE: We are NOT a U-Pick farm.
You cannot enter the blueberry growing areas and you are not permitted to pick berries as blueberry rust disease can easily be spread from your clothes and shoes.
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What Our Visitors Say…
What's happening on the farm?
Spring
Blueberries need regular watering throughout the growing season because they’ll stop producing flowers and fruit if they get too dry. When they are growing and fruiting, we start to apply fertiliser through drip irrigation called fertigation, as required (once or twice a week depending on our programme). We irrigate each block for 1 hour with 2 drippers on each plant, each one drips 4 litres in that hour, so the bush never becomes too dry or too wet.
In September, we give the bushes a folio spray of 100% seaweed extract. Towards the end of spring, the first berries start to ripen, and we’re preparing for harvest – getting the shed ready, all the picking trolleys & buckets need cleaning down, and we’re receiving boxes and punnets.
Summer
Summer means fresh blueberries ripening on the bushes and being hand-picked every day.
We have over 5,000 bushes on our farm and 10 different blueberry varieties which all ripen at different times – this ensures we have a constant crop of fresh blueberries all summer long for you to buy and enjoy.
On a blueberry bush, there will be berries at different stages of ripening, so we employ professional fruit pickers to carefully harvest (by hand) those blueberries that are perfectly ripe, because once picked, blueberries don’t ripen. We will pick one blueberry bush up to 8 times throughout the summer months.
Autumn
Early autumn sees us finish picking the late-harvesting varieties of blueberries. As the plants finish fruiting, we prune the low-lying branches and clean up the beds before winter. We also apply certain nutrients and trace elements as the plants are entering dormancy and these will be stored in the plant until the following spring.
Everything in the packing shed gets washed down, cleaned and stored away until the next season. We also catch up with general maintenance on the farm.
Winter
In winter we prune while the plants are dormant. We remove spindly older growth from young plants which encourages young, healthy shoots.And we condition the soil to make sure the ph levels are right,so the plants don’t die off or stop producing fruit. At the end of July our bees arrive –they are here til December and we rent 6 hives of bees to pollinate our blueberries. Ben (from Ben’s Bees) comes to feed the bees once or twice during their stay with some syrup, as blueberry flowers don’t produce enough pollen.Towards the end of winter in August, as flowering starts, we add dry fertiliser pellets by hand around the base of the bush.
