Serving up a winner
Although much fruit picking still requires old-fashioned graft, says Tim Field, picking your own is becoming as much entertainment as the action at Wimbledon
The heat is on. Sun-kissed faces gasp and cheer behind pots of strawberries and cream. A puff of chalk rises from a Murray cross-court forehand: game, set and match. As regular as Wimbledon, the soft-fruit season is upon us – a delight to be savoured.
My first summer job was strawberry picking at the local farmshop. It lasted two weeks; hours of bending and kneeling were simply unsustainable for a teenage layabout. Back then, pick-your-own operations and farmshops involved straw bales and honesty boxes. Most villages had one and for those without kitchen gardens or allotments, they were the source of delicious, inexpensive summer fruit for freezer-filling and jamming.
Today, there is a different culture around soft fruit. It is cheaper, abundant and available year-round – often at the cost of flavour. The do-it-yourself harvest doesn’t get any easier but the layabout pandemic has spread from teenagers to entire generations while kitchens are for admiring not cooking in and jamming is something you do with a guitar.
But times are changing and fruit is in line for a Brexit shake-up. If there’s one thing the horticulture industry fears about our departure from europe, it is the sourcing of cheap, willing labour. Some fruit and vegetable harvesting can be highly mechanised but there remains a significant demand for old-fashioned graft. harvesting is such an enormous cost there is constant effort to employ robotics but, as yet, innovative technology is not mainstream and the human hand prevails for many of the fiddly, awkward crops.
Large-scale commercial growers have spent years attempting to make harvesting easier in a bid to gain productivity. Take strawberries, where investment into tabletop has become increasingly prevalent. however, the peat or coir-based growing mediums add financial and environmental cost and the grower is now committing to infrastructure that must return a consistent and reliable yield otherwise the business is fragile. So yet more cost goes into throwing up miles upon miles of protected cropping under polytunnels – which really gets the NIMBY grumblers fuming, as seas of plastic suffocate the landscape. With commercial varieties planted, fruiting and discarded within a year the inputs are high; and then come the gangs of labour required to harvest on such a huge scale, dropped into the countryside from all corners but ghostly figures amongst the rural community. Despite the grower’s best efforts to make picking more efficient, large, commercial operations remain dangerously reliant on a hardworking seasonal workforce that commonly originates from overseas.
While the big producers wait to see what future Brexit negotiations hold, a number of alternative systems might look a little more attractive to a new entrant. For example, take henry Gurney from a family farm in Norfolk. entrepreneurial Gurney is reinventing the pick-your-own concept with pop-up operations for fruit and cut flowers. he applies knowledge of modern techniques to secure a reliable yield but avoids the stress of labour at harvest. That might seem risky in an era in which supermarkets sell the fruit as cheap without the backache, but Gurney has looked beyond his own farmland and taken tenancies on ground with high passing traffic of the right customer – one on the edge of Norwich and another neighbouring Amazona Zoo at Cromer. For those who don’t have the skills, space or inclination to grow at home, Gurney’s pick-your-own is as much an excursion, like stomping around a National Trust property, as it is an opportunity to harvest the freshest, ripest, most delicious fruit in season. he welcomes the generation of pickers embarking on an annual jamming session but just as many visitors come for a family outing.
Farmshops are evolving, too. here at Daylesford, the rows and varieties of strawberries are harvested hard but line up alongside other berries, currants, salads, herbs, tomatoes and hundreds of other crops in the 20-acre market garden. They are a favourite for browsing cookery school visitors and gluts go to on-farm jam making or an impromptu pick-your-own event. Diversity is the key to keeping staff motivated during long hours of harvesting and weeding in peak season. It is only viable on this scale when harvesting higher-value crops with a specific market, ignoring crops that can be done more competitively by specialist machinery and large-scale infrastructure.
The Brexit tsunami might be scary but there are opportunities. The experience of snaffling a ripe berry or currant is a fantastic way to re-engage the consumer on food provenance. Summer is made by freshly picked strawberries and the crowning of a Wimbledon champion; may they continue to be British grown for added delight.
Innovative technology is not mainstream and the human hand prevails for many fiddly crops