Strawberries


I have mixed feelings about strawberries. They are beautiful to see - both as flowers and as fruit tumbling down the side of their containers. But there are a few downsides.


The first is a personal one. I love eating ripe strawberries warmed by the summer sun, but I must not eat too many. If I do, I have an allergic reaction - my lips tingle and then swell up so much that I look like Mick Jagger.  I have the same reaction to too much pineapple and sometimes (fortunately rarely) to too many ripe tomatoes.  This doesn't stop me eating these lovely fruits, but I do have to be careful. When the plants are all fruiting at the same time, my willpower and dislike of wasting good food can sometimes overpower my common sense. I suppose I could just give them all to my husband to eat, but where's the fun in that?

The second reason is the slugs and blackbirds like them too. The third is that they take up a lot of space when allowed to sprawl across the garden bed. The fourth is that the picking season is a limited one and so I begrudge the use of that space.


This year I tried growing them in a dedicated strawberry tower. It worked up to a point. The problem was watering, even though the tower is meant to be designed to have a watering system - water distribution was uneven. I will have another go at using the system next year, as the problem may have been the drought we experienced throughout the fruiting season.

I lost many of the plants in the lower sections of the tower. But hopefully there is an upside to that loss. Last week I raided the sales benches at the local garden centre and bought a variety of strawberry plants at knockdown prices. The strawberries I grew this year were all grown from runners from three plants of an unspecified variety bought at carboot sale. As a result they all fruited at the same time and were susceptible to the same problems. Hopefully my new selection - with mid (Malling Centenary) and late (Fenella) fruiting varieties, Framberry (a strawberry which tastes like a raspberry!) and a variety called Snow White (it has white fruit) - will have more chance of success. Lastly I bought a perpetual strawberry, which is meant to fruit all summer and into autumn, unlike the others.


All with the exception of the perpetual strawberry were chosen because they had good runners. I have potted the new plants in larger pots and pinned down the runners in pots of their own. In total I should have at least twenty plants. Not bad for an outlay of £8. If they all survive the winter, my problem will be where to put them all, as the sharp-sighted of you will have noticed  there is only room for twelve plants in my strawberry tower. But I will solve that problem when I get to it. As for the issue of my strawberry allergy, maybe the longer fruiting season will help address my tendency to eat too many in one go. Or maybe my husband will get to them first!


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