Strawberries revisited

If you’re going to grow one thing that will be vastly superior to supermarket fruit and vegetables, I recommend strawberries.  Possibly my favourite fruit to eat, but only if home-grown.  Quite often when you eat them in a restaurant you are presented with a fine looking strawberry, but completely lacking in flavour.  And don’t get me started on why they leave on the green bit (hull).  The supermarket offerings are even worse, and in my opinion seem to be often on the point of going off when you buy them.

Home grown is a different matter.  Really sweet, tasty strawberries can be yours, if only for a short time each year.  Although you can extend the season with some varieties, more of this later.

Given that they are really tasty, you won’t be surprised that everything else that lives in your garden will want to eat them, so you will need to keep them protected from birds, slugs, mice and even woodlouse.

If you are considering growing strawberries, it may be worth experimenting a bit with different varieties.  There seems no point in growing the same varieties that are on offer in the supermarkets, after all they are mainly grown for appearance and long shelf life, rather than flavour.  The main supermarket variety was, up until recently, Elsanta, described  by food writers as “dull”, “boring”, “tasteless”.  Other varieties on offer in the supermarket can be Sonata, Malling Centenary and Malling Ace.  The trouble is you cannot always tell what variety it is unless it is helpfully printed on the carton.

So, what variety to grow?  Ask for recommendations and everyone will tell you a different variety. The other problem is that the seed catalogues all seem to claim each strawberry variety is the sweetest, best tasting etc.  So you might have to grow a few varieties to work out which one you like the best.

Over the years I have honed my preference to Gariguette.  An old French variety, very early to crop, with medium size pointed fruits.  They have very little hull, and a sweet tangy flavour.  They are not a heavy cropper, but they make up for this with flavour.

Last year I tried a relatively new variety, Snow White.  As the name implies this is a white strawberry, which according to Suttons was the sweetest strawberry in their trials.  Apparently it also has an aftertaste of pineapple!  My experience of growing this so far is that it does not crop that well, and it is very difficult to know when the berries are ripe, they start out white and stay white!  Even the birds are confused!

If you want to avoid a short strawberry season, try an everbearer.  I grew Mara Des Bois last year.  This is a variety that produces strawberries most of the summer.   I found they started quite late, but then just carried on all summer.  These are a variety of alpine strawberry, but are “normal” strawberry size.  They (apparently) recapture the flavour of the original woodland and alpine strawberry varieties.  I found them to taste very good, and even in the first year of planting they produced a good yield.

I grow strawberries from runners.  You need well drained soil.  I grow through weed fabric, covering the soil with the fabric and planting the strawberry runners in 10cm diameter holes cut in the fabric.    Once the fruits form from late May you will need to cover with netting to keep the birds off. 

Netting strawberries the easy way – with blue water pipe supports

Strawberry plants produce lots of new plants, called runners, after fruiting.  These runners can be encouraged to root (to be honest they don’t require much encouragement!) and used to extend your strawberry empire.  It’s also worth remembering that strawberry plants only last 3-4 years before the yields drop.  Ideally you need to then start a new strawberry patch, preferably not in the same place (to minimise disease).  So make sure you encourage a few runners to save on buying new plants.

One of the benefits of home-grown strawberries is that if you end up with a glut and cannot eat them all, you can always make strawberry jam, or if you have lots, strawberry wine.

My serving suggestion: Gariguette strawberries with a generous helping of Brinkworth Dairy cream.  No sugar required.