Start your best-ever fruit patch

Save cash and enjoy tasty crops

Perhaps you’ve enjoyed a few of your own fruity harvests this summer and are left wanting more, or perhaps friends shared some of their sweet and juicy homegrown strawberries that were indescribably better than those from the shops. Maybe you just enjoy fresh fruit and want to save a bit of cash… there are lots of reasons to start growing more of your own fruit, and now’s an ideal time to get going.

September is an excellent month to start planning. You can see where summer shade is and how big neighbouring plants will get after a season’s growth, something that can be difficult to visualise in the middle of winter. Plus, autumn’s a great time to plant all kinds of fruit because the soil’s still warm and roots can get established before winter, giving you bigger, more droughttolerant plants next year.

For the cheapest and most environmentally-friendly way of buying most fruit trees and bushes, choose bare-root plants. The bare-root planting season starts in just a couple of months, so now’s the best time to plan and prepare.

Getting your orders in early means you’ll have the maximum choice of varieties and get the best quality plants. The wonderful thing about growing your own is that you can try your hand with all sorts of weird and wonderful, tasty and colourful fruit that you just can’t find in the supermarket.

Here are our four desert (or dessert!) island fruits that we just couldn’t garden without, and some unusual varieties that make growing them even more rewarding.

Four essential fruits for your garden (and their unusual sidekicks!)