Mrs Clay’s guide to household thrift This week... strawberries

Xanthe Clay puts the purveyors of this quintessential summer fruit through their paces

Strawberries, Wimbledon, rain… the Great British summer is here again. Mind you, it has not – to put it mildly – been a promising year for our national berry, with the crop delayed by two weeks. It’s not so much that relentless rain has been the problem, as polytunnels have protected the British fruit since the 1990s, but rather the light levels, which have been the lowest in years. Strawberries need sunshine to ripen well, and it’s been in short supply.

Undeterred, Nick Marston, the chairman of the industry body British Berry Growers, told me phlegmatically, “With the UK season, we go in optimistically hoping that this year it will all work out.” That’s the proper British spirit. Marston is also keen to stress that slower-growing plants produce better-tasting fruit. Could this be true – or wishful thinking?

So, reader, I tasted the strawberries. Unlike ketchup, say, or ready-made lasagne, it’s a far from definitive test. The strawberries I picked up from the supermarket may not have come from the same grower as the ones that you find; the variety may not be the same; the weather conditions in which they were grown will definitely be different. But I was interested to see if the premium brands stood out against the standard versions.

I was looking for flavour and some sweetness, of course – no one wants a bland, sour berry. But a great strawberry is also one with a soft, juicy texture. A crunchy strawberry is wrong. Yet many of the berries I tried were hard, even once I’d brought them up to room temperature (cold strawberries never taste their best). It’s a problem for retailers: a really good strawberry is a delicate one, and so will inevitably look a bit battered in the box.

I did notice that strawberries that had been left spread on a tray for several hours started to soften and become more fragrant and powerful-tasting, even as they lost their lipstick-coloured gloss. This is what I will be doing with my strawberries this year. Never mind the looks, check out the flavour.

As for the varieties, there are two main types. Until the 1980s, all strawberries were autumn-planted “June bearers” – varieties such as Elsanta,

Malling Centenary and Sonata. These fruit for around three weeks, generally in June but sometimes a week or two earlier or later; the season runs for six weeks, finishing just after Wimbledon.

In the 1980s, other varieties called “everbearers” and “day-neutrals” were developed, which are planted in spring and fruit from July until the first frosts, so October or even November. Favori, Albion and Mount Everest fall into this category.

It’s not just these varieties that have stretched the season to lengths unimaginable to our great-grandparents. The much-maligned polytunnels have a major part to play. They may not be beautiful, but without the ubiquitous plastic arcs, says Marston, “if it rained, then strawberries would be ruined. Growers had to pick all the waste off and throw it away. And they’d probably be out of production for two or three or four days while other berries started to ripen.” Even a light shower could result in mushy or mildewed strawbs.

After the revolution in all-weather production and longer seasons, the next development was the top-tier strawberry. Driscoll’s jubilee was the pioneer, bred in Kent for the California-based growers Driscoll’s and released in 2002. Lower-yielding, so expensive to produce, it’s intensely flavoured, justifying a higher price, though it can be a bit small. Other, larger, premium strawberries followed including, in 2012, Malling Centenary, bred at West Malling in Kent, where the strawberry programme is now run by the German pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Bayer. Some now find their way into both standard and premium packs, notably Favori. Size matters, according to Marston, because we consumers prefer a bigger strawberry; and (possibly more saliently) because they are faster and more cost-effective to pick.

The cost of production is a huge issue for farmers. It has increased massively over the past three years, largely because of increased labour costs, which account for 50 per cent of the total spend. “If you want people to do hourly paid work, they have to be paid appropriately,” emphasises Marston. But the prices “really haven’t reflected those cost increases”.

Then there is the issue of “phytosanitary certificates”, which verify that agricultural products have been inspected and are pest- and disease-free. Since the UK left the European Union, these have been required for all fruit travelling over the Channel. With retailers placing orders two days ahead, and the shelf life of the strawberries barely longer than that, the additional days required to book a government plant health inspector put a potentially disastrous delay into the system.

British strawberry exports have never been huge, it’s true. According to World Bank data, we export about $9million (£7million) worth but import more than 30 times that value. Only the United States, Canada and Germany (which, incidentally, takes most of the British exports) spend more on shipped-in strawberries.

The dial may be moving on those imports at least. The Summer Berry Company in Chichester, West Sussex, is planning to produce strawberries yearround in its glasshouses, using heat pumps for power and LED lighting. No doubt others will follow, although the summer ones will always, surely, be best.

A really good strawberry is delicate: they will inevitably look battered in the box