Berries

Berries are easy to grow, plant once and harvest for many years! Bees love the flowers of raspberries, blackberries, tayberries and strawberries. Want to maximise the flavour of your strawberries? Legend has it that borage improves their taste. You may have to share them with the blackbirds! 

What?

Strawberries are easy to grow in containers or in the ground, but the fancy ones that are for hanging baskets can suffer in windy places. They produce “runners” which are long stems that grow new plants. You can peg them down in pots of compost and get even more new strawberry plants for next year.

Different types of strawberries will produce fruit at different times of the year, so if you want strawberries all year, choose a range of different varieties.

Where?

Whether you are growing in the ground, a bed or a container, the soil needs to be well-fertilised and well-dug. Make sure the container doesn’t get waterlogged. Use an organic fertiliser with potassium – a tomato feed is ideal.

Don’t plant them too deeply. The top of the root part – the “crown” – needs to be peeking out of the soil but not sticking up. Press it down firmly and water well. As the fruits grow, try not to get them wet as this can cause mould or rot. Water the soil around the plants instead.

When?

You don’t grow these from seed. In early spring, you can buy small plants in pots, or the runners which will look quite bare but are raring to go. Depending on what sort you buy, you can be picking strawberries all summer, but the most popular varieties tend to just fruit very heavily over two or three weeks – so you’ll have to eat a lot of strawberries in one go!

You can also plant them out in August and let them get settled in over winter.