The strawberry harvest has begun. Over the past week or so we have begun strawberry picking. Slowly since the warm Bank Holiday the strawberries began to develop, change colour from green to a mild pink/green to luscious strawberry red. All our plants are producing succulent berries and runners for next year.
For the lark, and to drive my wife nuts I am tracking the output. Yesterday we picked a full kilogram of fruit. Just in case some of you are questioning the weight of the container we had a tare on the scales. Our biggest individual strawberry was 37 Grammes, I admit to being hard to live with.
An update on the Strawberry Pipe, it is producing lots of fruit. It has positive and negative attributes. The positive, we had almost no weeds, I’d say I only pulled a few nettles from the holes. There was no need for straw. It is easy to water and I’d say it uses less water. The whole pipe is movable should you need move it perhaps to get the best sunny spot, we only moved it once. The strawberries hang down making them easy to pick. It was easy to cover with a cloche to improve ripening and deter birds and though it was only a few inches off the ground supported by some rocks we had no snail damage.
If one really had to, the pipe could with proper framed support be much higher which might be good for people with mobility issues. Also, it is easy to pot the runners by just placing a small pot of compost to on the ground to the side.
The negative, it held only 10 plants, though we could have put the holes closer together and put more in. We had about 60 plants in our main bed. Which required straw and weeding. I must admit we suffered almost no snail damage this year anyway.
My lovely wife made us a beautiful strawberry pavlova ..
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