John Kilbride
I didn’t originally plan to grow strawberries, but they insisted. When we moved into a house with a greenhouse, I had no experience in growing much, but it was too good an opportunity to miss. Too many people move into houses with greenhouses and get rid of them; any quick check of Facebook marketplace will probably turn up a few ‘Greenhouse for sale/greenhouse available free’ listings, with the inevitable ‘buyer must disassemble and uplift’ caveat. I get that greenhouses and kids are not a great combination, but ours survived, both the greenhouse and the teenager.
But what was to be grown there? After some debate, I though strawberries seemed kind of foolproof, so with some cheap plastic hanging baskets, and a few hooks, things started.
What I didn’t expect was how successful it would be. By using hanging baskets, I kept the strawberries off the ground, preventing them rotting before they were ripe, and having them in the greenhouse kept the hungry birds away. Or at least kept them peering unhappily through the glass.
As long as they were watered regularly the plants survived, even over winter, and by the following summer many of the plants had produced runners that had produced new plants, meaning I had a fresh batch to plant the following year without even trying too hard.
So this year I was up to over a dozen hanging baskets. Some more productive than others perhaps, but it was no great loss to replace older plants with fresh new ones that had grown unaided, reaching down from the baskets on long tendrils to find strange places to put their roots. Meanwhile, new hanging baskets could be acquired cheaply at the end of the summer season when the plants they contained were on the way out, easily replaced by some new strawberry plants that had emerged around the same time.
With the Scottish summer here for the next few days at least, it’s time to make the most of it. Walking into a tiny greenhouse that now smells strongly of strawberry is a pleasure in itself, but with the ripening crop at eye level it’s easy to collect a large handful of the ripest specimens.
I’m told pretty much every year that I should use some of the strawberries to make jam, but they never last long enough. There’s far more flavour packed in them than in the watery ones from the supermarket punnets, and the home-grown ones don’t keep long.
So best to go straight to the eating. A handful of ripe garden strawberries, perhaps still warm from the greenhouse, on top of a meringue nest and a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. Douse it with some strawberry tart jelly for an old-school double strawberry hit. It takes seconds to make, and tastes like the Scottish summer in a bowl: delicious and it doesn’t last long.
So if you’ve got a dormant greenhouse, invest in a few strawberry plants. You’ll thank yourself next summer, or even sooner if the weather continues.
