Home-grown strawberries are one of the great joys of summer and normally we harvest pounds of them from three 8ftx4ft beds. The tragedy is I usually miss most of the crop because I go to Japan in late June every year. This year I opted to stay home and eat the strawberries instead, but the spring drought and summer heat decimated the crop. The fruit was small and almost fermented on the plants. Along with broad beans, they were our biggest failure.

Strawberries are worth growing, however. You can get an excellent crop from an 8ftx4ft bed and you can grow a range of varieties to extend the season. There are ‘everfruiting’ varieties too, though they have a more aromatic alpine strawberry flavour. I grow a mixture, including ‘Hapil’ (a midseason sweet variety), ‘Sonata’ (a midseason strawberry that stands up to hot weather) ‘Honeoye’ (an early variety good for jam).

You can also but late varieties like ‘Florence’ (dark-red) and ‘Fenella, with glossy berries that shrug off heavy rain. Newer varieties are often selected for flavour and later varieties also have to be resistant to verticillium wilt and crown rot. They have to resist mildew, too.

‘Elegance’ (which is new) produces heavy crops of large, firm, glossy fruits with a sweet taste and a juicy, pleasant texture. In trials it proved to be the heaviest-cropping variety and it has impressed everyone. Traditional runners (raised from mother plants) are being sold by specialist fruit nurseries and ten runners should cost £5-10.

You can also raise your own by either pegging down the runners into the bare earth or by placing them in small individual pots of compost. The runner should be only cut once the baby plant is rooted.

This year there’s a breakthrough. You can buy Misted Tip plants. Although Misted Tips sound more like a runner in the Grand National, they are in fact plants grown from unrooted runner tips under a mist system — hence their name. These have been available to commercial growers for some years, but now the amateur gardener can buy them too. The chief benefit is that these vigorous young strawberries can be planted earlier, by late August and September, to produce a good crop next year. This is vital because the fruiting life of a strawberry is four years at most. After that, plants should be dug up and a fresh bit of ground found for another lot.

If you do have strawberry plants that have finished cropping, you should clear away any straw you may have used to cushion the fruit. Then all the leaves should be sheared off completely and technically put into bin.

Composting them can encourage disease. Once your plants are reduced to a crewcut, feed your bed with a general fertiliser to encourage strong growth for next year.

If you do go into fruit production you will have to guard against marauding blackbirds with a strong netting. I have evolved a system of short stakes topped with pots. This keeps the netting up there. Long canes threaded through the netting are used to make a frame so that the whole thing can be lifted off and then replaced in seconds.

Buy Misted Tips plants from Marshalls Seeds 01480 443390 (www.marshalls-seeds.co.uk) and Pomona Fruits 0845 676 0607 (www.pomonafruits.co.uk).