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'Easy-peasy' strawberries

With a little bit of forward planning anyone could be picking fresh, vitamin-packed, flavoursome, fruit from their garden, which most importantly, are easy to grow. Look for plants with an AGM award, -these are plants that are chosen by a panel of experts trialling for the RHS which are considered to be the best. These plants have beaten their rivals to the finishing post!



Strawberries demand a little more skill, although the sun-warmed strawberry picked fresh is as different as chalk and cheese when compared to a cold-stored supermarket strawberry. Varieties come in two forms, the everbearer and the summer fruiter. Everbearers, crop over many months but tend to be less strawberry flavoured owing to the alpine strawberry influence in their breeding. They produce very few or no runners and the fruit tends to be smaller. However if you want to nibble throughout summer, or have red fruits on show over months, try ‘Buddy’ a new everbearer released by East Malling in 2012. It has a truer strawberry flavour than the others.

If you want to eat home-grown strawberries in Wimbledon week opt for ‘Honeoye’, an early heavy-cropping variety with shiny berries with a sweet flavour. ‘Fenella’ (East Malling 2010) will give you a later crop of orange-red berries in mid-July. These are both summer-fruiting and all the leaves should be cut back to nothing after fruiting finishes. Feeding with a high potash food produces more berries and you must have a frost-free place because strawberry flowers are blackened at the merest hint of frost. In colder gardens, opt for a late variety if there’s only space for one. Netting is essential: we are dealing with the scrummiest fruit of all.

The perfect mixer for strawberries in a stewed fruit compote, is rhubarb and John's 3 Colours Red Rhubarb Collection will provide you with ‘Timperley Early’ (which can be forced once established), the red-stemmed ‘Raspberry Red’ and ‘Victoria’ - an old juicy variety with green stems. Not technically fruit, more of an honorary one, rhubarb prefers moist soil and a cool place because it originally came from the river banks of the River Volga.

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