Strawberry season

Washed, hulled, and ready to use.

The strawberries were early this year. As I mentioned previously, I picked my first on the last day of May, but for me (based on average conditions round here), June is the time for these fruits. That's when they are in full swing, producing handfuls a day from my patch of a couple of dozen plants. I grow four or five kinds, although the labels I carefully placed next to each plant when they went in three years ago have long since disappeared, and they've multiplied so much (sending out runners despite my best efforts at control) I now just treat them all the same. For the record, there are 'Honeoye', 'Cambridge Favourite', 'Hapil' (I think labelled as 'Happil' when I bought it), and 'Rhapsody' (but I'm not 100% sure of that last one). I wanted a range, partly to mitigate against disease, partly to give a longer season. In fact, the sizes, shapes, shades of red, and flavours are all very distinct - a strawberry is not a strawberry is not a strawberry.

The plants are meant to be replaced every three years, which gives me an opportunity to move the bed - it's currently on a terrace of the slope in the back garden, south-facing, on enriched clay soil. They thrive here, but I need the space for something else. I will ditch the gooseberry planted with them, which has never done well. I'll probably put them in raised beds I'm planning on building by the side of the house, which is a tough spot, being quite shady and cool. Maybe not so ideal for ripening, but I'll keep some in pots, too, to hedge my bets. I need the current fruit bed for vegetables, which I care more about now, and which will really benefit from the aspect of that location. I probably won't buy any more plants, because there are enough self-spread across the garden to provide for my needs - I'll just dig them up later in the year and relocate them.

Anyway, this year is providing the largest harvest ever, so the bed is certainly mature. As for earliness, I have a photo from last year of my strawberries from the 20th of June - and although it may not be of the first fruits, it's clear that they are indeed (as I may have said before) around two weeks early. There are many more fruits still on the plants, although blooming finished over a week ago, so I expect to be picking some for the next fortnight or so - perhaps till the end of the month. Thankfully, a bumper crop of raspberries will take over - the first fruits have started turning red, which is early again (I think of raspberries as more of a July crop), but around two weeks after the first strawberries, which is about right.

But what to do with this bounty? Well, first of all, enjoy it! The process of searching through the fruit patch, looking under leaves for bright red (or in my case, blush pink*) fruits is exciting, and very pleasant in warm summer sunshine (today, in the cold driving rain, it was not so fun). Eating them, perfectly ripe, unadulterated, is a simple, but satisfying pleasure. You could do the cream-and-sugar thing (I've never been a fan), or use them in a smoothie or cocktail (I find they work well, puréed, with bourbon). Or make a basic custard, blitz strawberries, pass through a sieve and/or muslin, combine, and freeze in an ice cream machine (or however you prefer to make it), maybe adding chopped strawberries, or a coulis, to really enhance the flavour.

With less-than-perfect, or slightly unripe fruits, try this: chop them quite finely, dust with fine sugar, drizzle with the best balsamic vinegar you can find, and if you like, some fresh, coarsely-ground black pepper, cover, and refrigerate overnight. Serve over vanilla ice cream, or with mascarpone. The strawberry flavour is much enhanced. I never used to like the idea of this, but it really works.

A pound of strawberries, waiting to be turned into syrup...

...and the finished product.

*I have to pick my strawberries a little before they are perfectly ripe, otherwise they get eaten by culprits unknown (probably slugs and snails). They turn deep red indoors in a day or two.

June harvest: week one

Two exciting things make this first June harvest particularly special. My first-ever home-grown cherry ripened a few days ago. I have two trees, which I planted two years ago. One I've trained as a fan against the top fence (a south-facing fence that runs along the terrace, higher than the house), and the other is planted on the opposite side of the terrace, and left to its own devices. I expected no fruit the first year (two or three flowers on one of the trees fell off), but last year there was some blossom, but no fruit either. The freestanding tree got infested both years by blackfly, making its new growth twisted and discoloured. This year, the fan-trained tree (which is much larger, whether due to the variety, the soil, position, or having its growth forced into a few strong branches) got the blackfly, but at least has set a couple of dozen fruits, but it was the other one that produced the first ripe fruit (of only three full-sized cherries on the whole tree).

Totals for week 1st-7th June:
1st: 8g chard (the last of last summer's rainbow chard - I need to re-sow), 40g spinach, 73g mint
2nd: 23g strawberries, 3g cherry
3rd: 62g strawberries, 33g spinach
5th: 30g peas + pea pods (I had to harvest some early, because one plant was looking sickly, so I stripped what was there, and cooked the whole lot as there wasn't much - the pods were tough), 53g broad bean tops (more on this below), 158g strawberries, and a negligible weight of (but big taste hit from) tarragon and parsley
6th: 128g strawberries
7th: 37g strawberries, 2g broad beans (I tried a large pod)
Total for week: 650g (more than the whole year to date!)
Year to date total: 1.16kg

Which means I beat my target a week early! (That's the second special thing, in case you were wondering). I'd hoped to harvest 500g in the first two weeks of June. Now, I don't want to get ahead of myself, so I'll revise it to 800g - I can't guarantee the strawberries will continue producing consistently (there's a mass of green fruit, but I suspect the weather has an effect on when they ripen). Second, I've harvested my first kilogramme of produce! Compared to Annie's Granny, it's small beer indeed, but it's a nice figure, and the heavy stuff comes later in the season (pumpkins, squash, tomatoes).

As you can see from the figures above, the vast majority of the weight is soft fruit, but I suppose it's slightly unfair since leaves don't weigh much (I've had lots of spinach, but even a large handful amounts to a few tens of grammes). If I was feeling uncharitable, I could also mention how most of it comes from perennials, rather than stuff I sowed/planted in the past few months. But produce is produce! And I think it's good to have a balance between crops that largely look after themselves with minimal intervention (mint is a prime example), and those that need more care, last a much shorter time, but allow for more experimentation year on year.

Now, a note on peas and beans, pre-empting the next couple of harvest totals. I planted two beds of broad beans in the front garden. One has been rather swamped by surrounding plants (mostly weeds), so I expect little from it; the other has grown luxuriantly - they are chest-high, with not a blackfly amongst them. But, there's part of the problem. I got it into my head that pinching out the tops was only necessary if they became infested, so I left them. They flowered their heads off, but the pods are small and few. The rule is, pinch out to allow the energy to go into the fruit - just like tomatoes. Second, the winds here in May have blasted the plants, stripping a lot of flowers. So, I don't expect much from them. In the back garden, I have two large planters, one with more broad beans, the other with peas. Incidentally, the two varieties of broad beans I planted were 'Karmazyn', a pink-fruited kind, and 'Red Epicure', with even darker pink/red beans (I have a batch of young crimson-flowered plants ready to go somewhere); the peas are 'Serpette Guillotteau'. Well, both have been attacked by snails relentlessly - even now they are large, the lower leaves are stripped, and even the pods have been nibbled.

So I don't expect much from my legumes this season. I've never done terribly well with peas, so maybe I should give up on them. I had high hopes for a glut of beans, but it seems it's not to be. At least the French and runner beans are looking healthy - for now!

End of May harvest update

Plenty more to come!

A quickie. May was a poor month for weather, and only those crops that were already producing yielded much, until the very end. However, as a portent of things to come (I hope!), the very last day of the month was the most exciting, and I picked my first strawberries of the year! That's a good fortnight early, so the recent cooler weather can't have retarded things too much.

Totals for two weeks from 15th-31st May:
17th: 43g spinach
21st: 22g spinach
25th: 27g lettuce (a 'volunteer', or self-sown plant, from who knows where), 15g spinach
26th: 28g mint (applemint, to be precise)
31st: 29g strawberries (three whole fruits!)
Total for fortnight: 164g
Year to date total: 510g

From now on, I'll post weekly harvest updates, as the soft fruits, peas, and beans will push the weights up considerably. I've already picked as much in the past three days as in the previous two weeks, for example! My goal is to have 500g from the 1st to the 14th of June - I'm pretty confident about that.

More details on the garden (and photos!) coming soon.