Val Bourne on how to cultivate sweet summer fruit

It may not have been a cold winter, like the ones we’ve got used to, but my strawberry patch is still looking quite ragged.

I need to cut off all the old leaves and give my plants a feed with a slow-release, sprinkle on potash-rich fertiliser like Vitax Q4. This will promote flower and fruit growth, without too much leaf, and tomato food will then be applied fortnightly once they get going. By late June my four grandchildren, India, Ellie, James and Jess, will be able to go out and pick the pudding, although I’m never sure how much fruit makes it back to the kitchen!

I know that you can buy strawberries in any supermarket throughout the year. However, growing your own allows you to pick sweet, fully ripe strawberries from a variety of your own choice. I have grown ‘Hapil’ and ‘Honeoye’ for many years and still recommend them. ‘Hapil’ is a mid-season cropper that produces regular-sized, orange-red fruit that’s almost conical in shape. It’s very sweet and recommended for lighter soils. ‘Honeoye’ is an earlier variety, with flavourful bright-red fruits. Both have done well for me.

However, a strawberry bed will only stay really productive for five years at the most, so I will be creating a new one with plants ordered now. One of the varieties I aim to plant is ‘Buddy’, bred at East Malling in Kent and released last year. This is a perpetual-fruiting, or everbearing, strawberry with a high Brix score of 10.2 per cent, so it’s sweeter than average. Most varieties only score between six per cent and nine per cent and most everbearers have an aromatic flavour not to everyone’s taste.

‘Buddy’ is widely available this year and is one of several Kent-bred varieties in recent years. The sweet, glossy and flavourful ‘Malling Centenary’, also released in 2012, marked 100 years of fruit breeding. Other popular East Malling strawberries include ‘Fenella’ (a late, orange-red variety with ‘Honeoye’ in its parentage) and ‘Elegance’, a mid-season variety with enormous fruit so probably best for containers. East Malling seem to be majoring on strawberries, but then one Kent grower supplies Wimbledon with 23 tonnes. That’s quite a tall order.

Frost is the enemy of the strawberry flower (and all other fruit) and it will blacken the centres and stop fruit from being produced.

My own garden is almost 700 ft above sea level, but it tends to miss late frosts because the cold air rolls down into the valley. If your garden is in a frost pocket, or low lying, opt for mid or late varieties rather than early ones.

Occasionally I have to fleece my plants and a double layer seems to protect them. I also fleece my apricot tree for the same reason. Once the fruit is formed the plants are ‘strawed’ and then netted to prevent thrushes and blackbirds from feasting.

The first large, sweet strawberries were accidental and occurred when a Chilean strawberry, Fragaria chiloense, and a North American variety F. virginiana were grown side by side by Antoine Nicolas Duchesne, botanist and gardener at the Palace of Versailles.

Duchesne’s hybrids were planted in England by two growers, Thomas Andrew Knight (1759–1838), a botanist and horticulturalist who lived at Downton Castle in Herefordshire, and Michael Keen, a market gardener in Isleworth, London. Both men named varieties in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the forerunners of our modern varieties.

Supplier: Pomona Fruit — www.pomonafruits.co.uk/0845 676 0607