Follow Bill's suggestion. Your soil is not friable. Is that true that you could over fertilize and get all foliage and no tubers? I'm worried b/c my foliage is very tall. Yes - or very few tubers. Depends on what you used and how much and also depends on your soil quality to begin with. If you haven't had your soil tested, it's always a good place to start. You should never apply fertilizer just because you can. You should get informed first. More is not necessarily better. Now, if the plant is getting everything it needs in balance, you can have both tall foliage as well as a high yield of tubers. The best fertilizer you can use is compost created from at least five different sources. It won't sterilize your soil, won't kill beneficial organisms or upset the ecosystem of your soil, it will help your plants with disease resistance, help with moisture retention in the soil, release nutrients at the proper rate, and there are a multitude of other benefits. Most people plant seed potatoes in a trench below soil level, then as they grow, you keep adding more soil until you are hilling them. You can hill so that two to 6 inches of foliage is showing. If you cover suppress parts of the vine from light, those parts will stop producing chlorophyll and root along the vine likely despite having photosynthesized in the first place. If you want to hill, hill often so that only two inches of stem are seen at the top. What results in a higher yield is not so much potatoes along the length of the stem as much as proper growing medium with plenty of water retention as well as with plenty of drainage. Many gardeners hill, but their yield isn't optimum because their growing medium isn't optimum to begin with. If your growing medium is optimum you'll get a higher yield from plants that aren't hilled much vs plants that are hilled to 8 feet in poor growing medium. The 8 feet has been successfully achieved in tires. Hume Seeds grew potatoes in eight stacks of tires, using eight different potato varieties. Each tire stack averaged 11 pounds of potatoes. Some readers reported yields of up to 38 pounds per stack. Here is a link that might be useful: Get your Garden Cooking with Friable Soil

I read another post, perhaps on another site, that said newly ground coffee - applied heavily - will keep the slugs/snails at bay. The caffeine (needs to be fresh, not yet used) kills them as they slither through it. I'm on my way to Costco to get their cheapest bag of beans and try it out. I read in the same post that Sluggo kills beneficial bugs too. I used Sluggo last year and it worked well. I'll use it again if the coffee fails.

What about our hard water? I've read some other posts where people hand-water their plants with vinegar-spiked water. I was kind of thinking of taking some fat (wide) 15 gallon tubs, cutting out the bottoms, and using those to plant the blueberries inground. That way, they would be somewhat isolated and I could treat their soil more locally (iron sulfate, elemental surful, peat, and some of the other amendments that people have mentioned in other posts). Maybe it would be easier to keep their immediate environment more acidic if I was treating a smaller area? How does that sound? Do you think doing that buys me anything? I don't know what I could do about watering though... seems the hard water would be fighting my attempts with the soil...

To answer your questions... I am not sure what was used on the lawn, but I guess I could call the local chem lawn service and find out. The yard has been recently treated, but I wasn't sure that even a year would be okay. I was also thinking about composte. If I use grass clippings and leaves in my composte that have been on the yard, I am still getting the chemicals. This is quite frustrating. I was thinking of just pruchasing some plastic kid swimming pools to use as "raised beds", and starting an "organic" mulch pile. This would take care of the chemical problem. Has anyone tried gardening in those plastic pools??? Then again I am sure the chemicals in my yard are no worse than the chemicals on the food I buy in the grocery store... Decisions, Decisions...