Tag Archives: Strawberries

Late June 2016 Growing Report

Fragoo Deep Rose Strawberries

Visually pleasing and deliciously sweet - our Fragoo Deep Rose strawberry plants.

Well, what a strange month June turned out to be! The most exciting news is that we now have an allotment! After that the biggest news has been the weather. The month started with a mini-heatwave which decimated crops in our plastic greenhouse, forcing us to get a move on and finish planting everything out. Then the wind and rain wreaked havoc with the plants once they were out! It hasn’t felt like June. Early in the month (after the few hot days), it was quite cold. It may as well have been April. It’s warmed up somewhat now, but…

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2015 – The Year In Review

Just some of our homegrown produce from this year.

Just some of what we grew and produced this year. Top left - bottom right: winter squashes, parsnip, kohlrabi, a batch of jam, mushrooms, spiralised courgette ('courgetti'), plums, tomatoes and courgettes, squashes in our pumpkin patch.

This year was our first in our current home with our rather large garden. We moved into this house in May, and although we were late out with many of our crops, we’ve had a very successful growing season. In this post we’ll look back over the year and share where we feel we were successful, and where we were not. Soft Fruits By far our largest and most used soft fruit crop was our plums. We can’t really take much credit for this crop, as all of the trees were already here when we moved in, and we have…

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Late December Garden Update

Alpine strawberries starting to fruit in December

Strawberries starting to fruit at the end of December

December this year has been very mild. Indeed, the Met Office are reporting that here in England it has been the warmest December since records began in 1910. We have certainly seen that here in our garden and elsewhere. With daytime temperatures between 10 and 14°C, many of our strawberry plants are convinced that it’s spring, as the photo above shows. With no threat of frosts we have left many of our beetroots to be harvested and we are still picking them fresh as and when we require them. Even our dwarf clementine tree still sits in the front garden…

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Early August Garden Update

Pumpkin Patch in August

The pumpkin patch is coming on leaps on bounds.

Just a quick update from the garden. It’s amazing how much it’s come on in the two months since we really set to work. Particularly the crops that we didn’t plant until we moved in, for example everything in the pumpkin patch (every single plant in the image above), the runner beans, potatoes, beetroot and parsnips, to name but a few. Much to the kids’ excitement we’ve recently started harvesting our blueberries (potted plants we brought with us). Our potatoes have started dying back too, so the kids can get their hands dirty harvesting them soon (probably their favourite garden…

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Start of the Strawberry Season

Albion Strawberry

The season's first ripe strawberry

Yesterday (20th June), marked the official start of our strawberry season. We harvested our very first ripe strawberry of the year, and it surprisingly wasn’t the one in the basket at the front of the house that was on the verge of ripeness a week ago. Instead it was one in a pot in the back yard. We’re still yet to get round to arranging the back yard and it is currently strewn with plants in pots from the old house. Most of these pots contain strawberry runners that I have kept. It was one of these that was bearing…

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