COLUMNIST: ELI APPLEBY-DONALD
When I am asked to offer advice on what a new gardener should grow in terms of edibles, I always offer the suggestion of strawberries because of how easy it is to grow strawberries and just how much fruit you can get for very little effort. I think strawberries are the perfect starter crop.
I guess for the new gardener, who maybe hasn’t tried out growing food yet, strawberries might seem like a crop more suited to a more southernly climate. After all, they are heavily associated with hot summer days and fruit punch at a garden party, or famously as a treat while watching tennis under a baking summer sun.
But strawberries are a frost-hardy perennial, meaning they will survive and thrive in many of our gardens throughout Scotland, and the Scottish summer offers them the two things they crave: sun and water. I know you may be agog at my suggestion of sun, but genuinely, Scotland gets an awful lot more light than our southern neighbours, more than many people realise - we just don’t get the heat at the same levels.
We have a wealth of varieties of strawberries to choose from, and choosing the right one means you could be picking fruit from late spring right through to the start of autumn. The most common type grown in Scotland however, tends to be something referred to as June-bearing strawberries.
Quite simply, this variety will give you ripe fruit from mid to late June throughout summer - examples include ‘Christine’ and ‘Korona’. These plants are heavy producers giving you a bumper harvest perfect for making jam. But the downside of heavy-producing plants is that they will only give you one crop before settling into their late-season life as pretty foliage to keep your garden looking green.
If you’d like to continue picking ripe strawberries into Autumn, you may be better to choose everbearing varieties, like ‘Buddy’ or ‘Finesse'. As the name suggests, these varieties will produce multiple crops over the course of late Spring to early Autumn. The harvests will be slightly smaller, so not a great option if you really do want a glut of fruit for jam-making, but if you want to continue picking and eating fresh, ripe fruit, this may be a good option for you.
For those jam makers, you might like to try ‘Sweetheart’. Usually producing large harvests in mid to late June.
‘Elsanta’ is probably the most well-known variety and is easily available in most garden centres. Another heavy cropper with great-tasting fruit.
For something a bit more unusual, you could try ‘Rhapsody’, a Scottish variety that does well in our cooler climate and produces in late July to early August.
Or if you’d like to try an everbearer variety, ‘Albion’ will produce slightly smaller fruits from July through to late September.
As I mentioned earlier, strawberries love the sun - the more sun they have, the quicker they will produce and the better the fruit will be. If you have a garden in partial shade though, you can still grow these beauties, you may just find that the plants take a little longer to produce, and the harvests are slightly smaller.
Once you’ve chosen your spot, prepare the ground with lots of organic matter, like lovely homemade compost or well-rotted manure. Place your little plants roughly 18 to 25 inches apart to leave lots of space to weed, water, and for airflow. Strawberries can be hit with moulds and mildew so lots of airflow is best. They do love a fertile and free-draining home, but if you have clay-heavy soil, not to worry.
Strawberries grow equally as well in pots and containers so you could opt for that instead. You may have to water more frequently with container gardening as the soil can dry out much faster. Strawberries are a shallow rooting plant, so they will suffer during a drought.
When planting, make sure the soil is the same level as the crown - the part of the little plant from where the leaves grow.
The most common way to buy strawberry plants for a new garden is to buy them either in pots from your local garden centre or as bare-root plants from an online supplier.
Although you can plant out into the garden in autumn, and this will give them time to settle in and develop their roots, most gardeners buy and plant strawberries in early spring to take advantage of that building warmth of the sun and the boost of growth it brings. The only downside is you might find you’ll get a slightly smaller harvest in the first year for spring-planted strawberries.
While your plants are growing, they need very little from you other than water. Strawberries are shallow rooting plants so they can suffer if you let the soil dry out too much.
To get the very best harvests from your plants, watch out for those little flowers beginning to appear. This is your signal to step up your game and get serious about growing your tasty berries.
The first thing to think about at this stage is food. Those little plants are now going to put a lot of effort into creating the red jewels you are waiting on. To get the very biggest and tastiest harvest you can, you can provide extra nutrition for your plants at this stage with regular feeding using a high potash fertiliser, much as you do with other crops like tomatoes. Start feeding as soon as you see those flowers develop and keep feeding until the plants have stopped producing.
You should also take the time to prepare the bed or containers by adding a layer of mulch, most commonly straw, but you could also use mulch mats. The mulch will do two essential things: it will help to retain moisture in the soil by reducing evaporation as the temperatures rise, and it will prevent the fruit from sitting on the wet ground and potentially rotting.
Unfortunately, we are not the only animals who think strawberries are super tasty. Common pests you will battle for your berries are birds and slugs.
In order to keep as much of your harvest for yourself as possible, try adding a cover of netting over your bed to prevent the birds from stealing those tasty strawberries. You can make a simple cover by propping some netting over the bed on bamboo canes and holding the nets in place on the ground with pegs or large stones.
With slugs, the best way to win that battle is to be vigilant. Check your strawberries every day and pick any that are ripe. Leaving them on the plant will just tempt the slugs to come find them.
At the end of the year, when all your harvests are passed, you can simply snip off old leaves to tidy your plants leaving the crown and any new leaves in place. Then remove the mulch, which if it is organic mulch, like straw, you can add to your compost pile. You can now leave the strawberry bed to go dormant over winter and wait for next spring when it comes to life again.
As your strawberry plants grow throughout the year, you will notice they create long stems which reach out to new parts of the bed and take root. These are called these runners, and these are new strawberry plants.
If you let them root and develop a little, you can then snip the long stem connecting them to the original plant and that becomes a whole new strawberry plant - perfect for increasing your stock of plants or replacing old ones.
In the very first year of your new strawberry growing season, it is best not to let these runners develop and to snip them off whenever you see them. This lets the new plants grow and get stronger without the runners sapping strength from them.
Eli Appleby-Donald, of @inthegardenwitheliandkate, tends a productive garden in Musselburgh, East Lothian, on the principle that gardening should be fun. She has an urban garden which she has managed to make as beautiful and productive as possible, given it is north facing and mostly in shade. She considers herself a perpetual learner gardener, and has spent the last 11 years learning by experience, success, and failure.
A digital education guru by day, the lack of good information about growing in Scotland when she started, spurred Eli into putting those skills in action, and she regularly blogs and vlogs about gardening on her own website and YouTube channel, as well as appearing as a guest on others worldwide.
You can find out more about Eli and all the fun of creating your own suburban garden paradise on either her YouTube channel, or her website.