Summer Strawberries

There is nothing better than a bowl of freshly picked, ripe strawberries, warm from the sun, sprinkled with sugar and doused with cream!

Lets take a look at some of our favourite strawberry varieties, along with some other soft fruit that will make your mouth water. All can be grown in pots, and with a little care, will reward you handsomely for several years to come.

Strawberry plants are available in three main types – summer fruiting, ever bearers and day-neutral.  If you have room for just a few plants, summer fruiting varieties would be the best for you.  There is a huge choice here, but we love 'Honeyoye' (even though its name is hard to pronounce!) for early crops, Rhapsody for late cropping, and good old 'Elsanta' as a good all-rounder.  Elsanta is the variety most often grown for the supermarkets, for good reason.  It is heavy cropping, easy to grow and with a good flavour.  If you have the space, try some of each to extend your picking season. Everbearers, also known as perpetual types, produce a couple of crops per year.  The pickings are not heavy, but if you are growing in pots, they make a lovely decorative and tasty addition to the patio.  We recommend Albion for flavour.

You may prefer raspberries to strawberries for their rich flavour, and an exciting development in fruit breeding has resulted in the first truly dwarfing raspberry suitable for pot culture, as it only reaches around a metre in height, with multiple stems.  ‘Little Sweet Sister’ is summer fruiting and it’s available now.  Prune out stems which have borne fruit immediately after cropping has finished. 

Blueberries, are easy to grow in pots – they love acid growing conditions so pot into ericaceous compost, and feed with ericaceous fertilizer.  Although self-fertile, they produce heavier crops if more than one is grown.   They love the sunshine, and will need protection from birds, eager to get to the delicious berries before you!

If you want to impress your friends, there’s even a blueberry that’s pink. Pink Lemonade was developed in America and each fruit matures to a rich pink colour.  It’s grown in exactly the same way as normal blueberries. 

Did you know?

Around 28,000 kilos of strawberries are consumed by spectators during the Wimbledon Tennis Champs!