Strawberry yields forever!
How to get the very best results from the nation’s best-loved summer fruit
WE HAVE a dashing French spy by the name of Amedee-Francois Frezier to thank for our favourite summer fruit. Sent on a mission by King Louis XIV to monitor Spanish activity in colonial Chile, he secretly kept track of everything, from the opening of gold mines to the building of fortifications.
His most fortuitous discovery, though, came when he was exploring a coastal valley and came across some fields of cultivated strawberries. The plants were dramatically different from the wild woodland strawberries native to Europe, boasting larger leaves and much bigger fruit.
Excited about his discovery, he dug up several plants and potted them in soil for his return home. The journey at sea took about six months, and fresh water was so limited that only five plants were still alive when his ship docked in Marseilles on August 17, 1714.
Today, there are close to 100 different strawberries that will provide fruit from late spring until the first frosts, depending on what you grow. Pot-grown, plug or bareroot plants are available for planting now in containers, growing bags or in the ground. They will establish quickly to produce a flush of berries this year with an average of 1lb of fruit per plant in subsequent years.
Garden strawberries are divided into two groups based on when the berries appear. Summer-fruiting ones tend to have a single, heavy flush of fruit over two to three weeks, at some point from late May to the end of August – varieties are usually described as early, mid or late season.
The second group are known as everbearers or perpetual strawberries. These produce their first berries in June and continue to fruit on and off lightly into the autumn. Fruit tend to be smaller and crops less abundant, but they are useful for extending the growing season.
SUMMER-fruiting strawberry plants should provide you with heavy crops for about four years. Everbearer strawberries need replacing every couple of years or so. ‘Honeoye’ is a cracking earlysummer-fruiting strawberry with large, bright red berries in June, while aromatic ‘Rosie’ was bred at East Malling Research Station in Kent.
Of the mid-season strawberries, ‘Cambridge Favourite’ is popular with pick-your-own farms due to its large red berries that cope well with poor summer weather.
Both ‘Elsanta’ and ‘Sonata’ are classic varieties that are served to thousands of tennis fans each year at the Wimbledon Championships. For fruit at the tail end of summer, try ‘Fenella’, ‘Cupid’ and ‘Pandora’, whose fruit are ripe from mid-July to mid-August.
‘Symphony’ was bred in Scotland and is particularly good for anyone who struggles to grow strawberries under damp conditions in the north of the country. There’s not a massive choice of everbearers. ‘Tango’ is a new one that produces the bulk of its crop in mid-summer with smaller flushes well into autumn. ‘Ostara’, ‘Bolero’ and ‘Calypso’ have a more traditional fruiting habit, with a steady supply of fruit over several months.
THOUGH they have pretty white flowers, strawberries are usually grown solely for their fruit. One, however, does have foliage that will cause a splash. Fragaria x ananassa ‘Variegata’ makes an eye-catching clump of green and cream splashed leaves, but is not really worth growing if you’re interested in a bumper harvest as the fruit are small.
Strawberries prefer a sunny spot with well-drained, fertile soil. Dig in plenty of garden compost, leaf mould or wellrotted manure before planting, then space plants 18in apart with 3ft between rows. Scatter general fertiliser granules around plants to get them off to a flying start.
Another option is to raise them in containers. A single plant is perfect in an 8in pot filled with multi-purpose compost, while four will provide plenty of pickings from a 15in hanging basket. I’ve had great results from raising them in growing bags, spacing three down each side.
I wouldn’t bother growing them in multi-holed strawberry pots, ‘towers’ or barrels. These devices might look good and seem like a clever space-saving idea, but once plants form a lot of foliage it’s incredibly tricky to water effectively and plants tend to flag, reducing yields.