Adventures in planting blueberries

I have been all talk about this for about a year, but I finally decided to take action and plant some blueberry bushes in our backyard.  Now, I must disclose that I am not a gardener.  In fact, my ability to keep houseplants alive is really not good.  But I really wanted to give this a go because I think it would be really cool to have some sort of fruit-bearing plant right there in my yard.  Plus, I think Ally would get a kick out of picking berries.  So I took the plunge and purchased a set of 3 blueberry plants from Burpee.com. 

Now, I will admit, I kind of thought that the plants we were going to get in the mail would be fairly substantial looking, like this:

I had found something online that said we were supposed to dig holes 2 ft across by 2 ft deep.  So last Saturday, Ben and I went to work digging 3 holes in our yard 2ft across by 2 ft deep.  Well, actually Ben did most of the digging as I am 7.5 months pregnant and not exactly in the best physical shape right now.  It took a pretty good chunk of time to do this, and we ended up with holes looking something like this:

But what came in the mail looked something like this:

As you can imagine, I felt a little silly having had Ben spend a greater part of our Saturday morning digging 3 ginormous holes for tiny seedlings.  Also, I came to the realization that we probably wouldn't have a blueberry crop until next summer.  So last night, we back-filled our 3 holes with dirt and peat moss and planted the little seedlings in the backyard.  Now they look something like this:

My next task is to construct some wire cages to put around the plants so that the deer and rabbits don't get to them.  I guess in about 14 months, we'll be swimming in blueberries!  I did find something at Lowe's yesterday that might give me a little more instant gratification though:  hanging potted strawberry plants.  I'm going to get one today and try it out.