TOBY BUCKLAND
Alpine strawberries bear the tastiest crops, Toby reveals
Alpine strawberries are gardening’s best-kept secret
SMEARING strawberries across sheets of kitchen roll might seem like a bizarre waste of good fruit. But what’s left, once the paper mops up the moisture and the rest dries, is crop of clean, fawn-coloured kernels ready for sowing into pots.
While most strawberry varieties are sold as plants (they don’t come true from seed) there’s one particularly flavoursome type that’s always worth sowing, especially if seeds are gathered from a larger than normal fruit.
Fraises des bois are the best strawberries that most people have never… well, tasted. About the size of a podded pea, soft and often misshapen, it’d take an experienced picker half a day to fill a punnet, explaining why they’re not widely available in supermarkets.
They’re also the most tempting to eat straight from the plant, with a scent so strong that you know the pillar-box red berries are ripe even before you see them.
Also known as alpine strawberries, they’re the choice of chefs who prize them for their intense flavour and for decorating puddings. In fact, it was a chef wanting to grow a stock of these hard-tobuy fruits that showed me the kitchen paper trick.
Large fruit are chosen because from big berries, even bigger strawberries grow. The alpine berry that caught my chef friend’s eye wasn’t just large; it was also white with a tangible pineapple twist.
This was a decade ago before the seed of the white type was widely available (see Mr Fothergill’s catalogue for details) and if you like something different, it’s well worth a try.
Seeds of the red or white type can be sown at any time during the growing season. The only thing to know is that
they take about a month to sprout, so pots must be kept moist even if they appear lifeless. Once up, pot individually and over-winter in a cold frame for planting in spring.
They’re the easiest strawberry and will happily cover the ground under trees and shrubs and even mix among long grass. If sown now there’s every chance of fruit next summer. Just make sure you save the biggest and best for sowing more.
“Tempting to eat from the plant”