Really Fruitful Gardening

Grow the best-eating strawberries yourself, says Peter

- Peter Seabrook

There has been much talk about a shortage of people to harvest crops, which I personally find difficult to understand. I spent a month in my late teens picking apples and loved it, up with the lark, out in the orchard with the birds singing, and up ladders picking rosy red, sweet ‘Worcester Pearmain’ apples.

Recently, I covered a strawberry harvesting story, and this is no longer the back-breaking job it used to be. Fruits are either chest high with the tabletop growbag system, or pickers are nine abreast, lying horizontal on a picking rig travelling forward, so the ripe fruits come to the pickers.

Strawberries are coming nicely into flower in my garden, and it will not be long before we have the seasonal switch from tart rhubarb to fragrant berries. Several early strawberry flowers in a low hollow, on a Reading allotment had tell-tale black centres. This is the sign of night frost damage – but with luck, subsequent flowers with yellow centres should set fruits OK.