Tophat blueberry grows a magical 24 inches tall

Growing plants involves patience and skill no doubt, but sometimes it involves magic. Our friend and magician Mort Eichenbaum can dazzle with card tricks even once letting us choose from an invisible deck of cards only to tell us which card we secretly picked.  Mort knows that one of the best magic tricks, especially for kids, is always the one first performed in 1814 by the French magician Comte, pulling a rabbit out of a tophat.

Who doesn’t love rabbits and who doesn’t love tophats? Uncle Sam always wears a red, white and blue tophat, John F. Kennedy wore a tophat at his inauguration and Abraham Lincoln kept important letters inside his towering stovepipe tophat.

So what fun and magic to grow your own tophat. An edible one of course. Tophat blueberry is a cross of a Highbush (Vaccinium corymbosum) and a Lowbush (V. angustifolium) that performs the neat trick of growing just 24 inches tall. Perfect for a pot or a hedge, the white blossoms burst forth in mid spring, followed by a surprising yield of up to several pounds per plant of healthy, oxidant-rich blueberries. After the harvest in late July and August, the plants stay attractive with rich blue-green leaves that change to a colorful red each fall for a nice garden accent.

The magic doesn’t stop there. Tophat is extremely hardy, thriving in heat that burns many other blueberry plants, yet is able to stand up to the most brutal winters. It can grow in USDA zones 3-7.

Like any blueberry, Tophat does best in in full sun to light shade. Blueberries are notorious for wanting acidic soil, and growing Tophat in a pot makes that all the easier. Choose a high acid potting soil meant for azaleas, rhododendrons, and camellias. Or mix peat moss into regular potting soil. Be sure your container has a hole in the bottom for good drainage. Plant in the spring or fall.

Tophat blueberry plants (also spelled as two words Top Hat) are widely available; ask your local nursery to order them if they don’t have them in stock. By mail you can get Tophat and Northsky blueberry plants from suppliers such as Burpee (W. Atlee Burpee & Co., 300 Park Ave., Warminster, PA 18974).

If you have the room, you can plant Tophat blueberries directly in the garden. You can even tuck them into the flowerbed. You will have to keep the soil on the acidic side with a pH 4.0-5.5, so pine needles, old oak leaves and peat moss all make a nice mulch.

While Tophat is self-pollinating, you will have higher yields if another blueberry is nearby. Try the dwarf Northsky which grows into a compact mounding plant under two feet tall. Northsky has small berries but they have a distinct wild blueberry flavor.

Because blueberries react poorly to too much fertilizer stick with organic fertilizers such as cottonseed meal or blood meal and use sparingly. The only pruning you need to do is to remove dead branches when the plants are dormant and have lost all of their leaves in the fall. You can even prune Top Hat into a bonsai, because it can survive in the shallow bonsai dishes.

Plant dwarf Top Hat blueberries in a pot or in the garden and you will have pounds of nutritious, vitamin-rich berries for pies, muffins or just eating out of hand.

And it is easier magic than pulling a rabbit out of your tophat. Just ask Mort the magician.