Allotment soft fruit

Last year Pat and Steph at Bifurcated Carrots were kind enough to send me some white alpine strawberry seed. At the same time, we had to move 201’s overgrown, highly rampant raspberries into an area where they could be corralled. I planted my strawberry seed and dug up my raspberry canes without any expectation of fruit from either this year.

The seed went into the greenhouse and came up as absolutely tiny plantlets. I grew some on for myself and gave all the others away – some went to the allotment that grows crops for the local hospice, so I hoped that the plants would be given enough time to prove themselves before being dug up to make room for something else.

How very wrong I was to doubt!

Okay, we’re not exactly in a glut situation, but the strawberries never will be a glut crop – they grow a few fruit at a time over a long time frame, so you get just enough to have with your breakfast cereal or to snack on at lunchtime. They are delicious - tangy, almost citrus-flavoured and very soft, more like a raspberry in texture than a strawberry. The raspberries themselves have done very well to fruit at all, so I’m definitely not complaining about their productivity.

So this is with thanks to Pat and Steph, and an encouragement to people who’ve only grown seed from seed companies – it’s not difficult to harvest seed, and it seems quite easy to grow it too. If I can do it, anybody can!

Labels: allotment-alpine-strawberries, allotment-raspberries, allotment-soft-fruit, allotment-strawberries