It's been a fruitful week!

Ruth has been propagating and pruning her fruit stock

- Ruth Hayes

WE have had an amazing harvest of soft fruits and this week I've been tidying up our harvested summer raspberries and potting up runners from our strawberry plants.

The raspberries are easy to deal with - select the fruited canes and cut them back to the ground, leaving room for unfruited stems to grow and mature for next year's harvest.

The two are easy to tell apart, as the older plants have woody brown stems and tatty leaves, while the younger ones have pliant green stems and healthy foliage.

Strawberry plants should be replaced every few years to prevent a build-up of diseases and the cheapest and easiest way of doing this is to propagate plants from their runners, the overground roots that they send out along the soil.