Of all the fruits you can grow at home, berries provide some of the biggest rewards in terms of flavour. You can’t buy a strawberry as intensely sweet as one that you grow yourself. You often can’t buy a fresh mulberry at all. As for raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, blueberries and all the other berries that come into their own in the warmest months, supermarket ones just don’t compare.
Enjoying berries straight from the plant is one of the delights of late spring and summer. Swollen and sun-warmed, they offer the perfect sugary tang. Handfuls of them disappear in no time, which is good because they don’t keep well.
For all their punchy flavours, berries are exceedingly thin-skinned. Easily bruised, they are vulnerable to mould and prone to turning mushy. Long-haul trucking and even short-term storage doesn’t do them any favours. But grow them yourself and you can pick them soft and eat them with their inky juices running free.
Best eaten fresh, warm and straight from the garden, homegrown strawberries do not compare with those from the supermarket.Credit: Getty Images/500px Plus
Mulberries are among the first to be savoured. You might already be snacking on these sweet-tart, purple-black fruits from a branch near you. While the Black English mulberry can reach a height of 10 metres, nurseries sell a wide range of smaller varieties that are suitable for pots and are therefore easily netted to protect the fruit from birds.
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The great thing about mulberries is that they are endlessly adaptable – to the amount of space available, to the type of soil you have. Different varieties work across different climates too, including both sub-tropical and cool temperate ones. Fast growing with large leaves (that can be used in herbal teas), they can make great shade trees.
Even if you don’t grow your own, you might find somewhere to forage mulberries because you sometimes see these trees growing in streets. Blackberries, a weed of national significance, are also good foraging fare but be sure to harvest only from those thickets that you are certain have not been sprayed with herbicides.
You won’t generally find mulberries in the supermarket but they are easy to grow at home and well suited to growing in pots.Credit: Getty Images
Alternatively, choose one of the specially bred, less thuggish blackberry varieties available in nurseries and cultivate your own. Plant an assortment of different types and you can be harvesting blackberries all the way through until autumn. You won’t even hurt yourself in the process because these varieties have the added bonus of having either no, or very small, thorns.
