Red & White Alpine Strawberries

Just took a little time out today to repot the first of my red & white alpine strawbs.

I waited until the largest were almost as tall as the windowsill propagator lid before doing so. The seedlings were still very fragile and the stems very thin so lots of care was required.

I packed them in small 7cm black square pots and put a few single pellets of all purpose feed in with each and stuck them back on the windowsill.

I still have a good few to repot pot (as well as my Leo Alba and Yellow Wonder alpine strawb varieties) which I will transfer to pots when they are bigger.

Latest purchases / plantings

Top row L-R.

Tomato F1 Sungold - Suttons: I bought a couple of young Sungold plants early last year, they fruited prolifically and were the tastiest cherry tomato I had ever eaten so I thought I'd try to grow from seed this year.

Pepper Gusto Purple F1 - Mr Fothergill's : I've not yet grown a chili pepper so I thought I'd start with this medium hot variety. The chili peppers start a deep purple before maturing to a red.

Mustard (Oriental Colour & Bite) salad leaves - Mr Fothergill's : I grew this successfully last year and would recommend to all for its unique mustard flavour with a sweet (almost honey like) note to it that livened up many salads.

Middle row L-R

Radish Bright Lights - Mr Fothergill's : I grew a couple of varieties of radish last year but these just looked fun. Little balls of various bright colours should liven up meal times!

Tomato Green Zebra - Mr Fothergill's : I enjoyed some tasty green toms in a mixed tub of toms from the supermarket and so thought I'd give these a go when I stumbled across them. Toms start out pale green with stiped green skin, they mature to a yellow/green but maintain the dark green stripes

Strawberry Toscana F1 - Mr Fothergill's : Large cone-shaped berries that grow on dense plants that send out few runners. Before the fruit arrive you get to admire a unique deep pink flower.

Bottom row L-R

Carrot Paris Market 5 Atlas - Mr Fothergill's : I tried a couple of varieties of carrots in deep containers last year but with no success. I thought I'd try these small, round carrots.

Pepper Colour Spectrum - Johnsons : I bought these last year but too late to plant. The packet promises the full range of coloured sweet peppers (green, yellow, orange, red, purple, white and black). I hope these work out as I'm looking forward to seeing the added colour in my garden!

Pepper Orange Baby - Mr Fothergill's : These were purchased last year too. A high yielding compact plant that produces plenty of mini orange sweet peppers, perfect for pots on the patio.

Latest Strange Purchases

I've definitely got some weird addiction to the strange and wonderful varieties! For me it's all about growing varieties that you just can't buy in the supermarkets and tasting tastes that you wouldn't otherwise taste. It helps if the crop has an unusual look it it as well.

And so... Clockwise from top:

Summer Basil Surprise. A red variety that you can grow on the windowsill and is ready in just 21 days apparently. You can sow it indoors from March.

Tomato F1 Sweet 'n' Neat Yellow. Ideal for patios and those with not much space to spare. Loads of sweet yellow toms. A little more expensive at £2 for 7 seeds, hopefully they will all take!

Salad Onion Apache. The wife and I love a good spring onion but we've never tried a red variety. Loads of seeds, ready in up to 3 months.

Heirloom Red Popping Corn "Strawberry". A homegrown popcorn treat. Each plant is only supposed to produce 3 or 4 ears of corn, which is why this variety is not commercially popular but what it lacks in productivity it makes up for with aesthectics, brilliant red kernals on a short ear that give it the name 'strawberry'. I'm really hoping this will be successful as I'm looking forward to sticking on a movie with the family and popping my own corn!

Firetongue Climbing Bean. A really unique looking bean with pale green pods heavily splashed with red streaks hiding large white beans with purple speckles. I bought a cane planter for around £6 delivered on ebay. I'm not sure how I'm going use them when they're ready to harvest but they looked so interesting that I just had to give them a go!

Amethyst Dwarf French Bean. I bought a small dwarf bean (green) plant last year at B&Q for a couple of quid, just for the hell of it. I didn't think much about it at first but it required very little care and well into the season the beans just kept coming and coming! I can't wait to see these deep purple beans come in!

I've just ordered another batch of seeds... Plus I've got a load from last year that I've yet to try but more about those next time.

Overwintering Strawberries

I bought a couple of packs of 6 strawberry plants last year (I remember I bought one from B&Q, the other maybe from Homebase). I watered them well and stuck them 3 plants in a one long planter with multi-purpose plant feed pellets.

I forgot to make a note of the variety name (they were the very first thing I bought and I didn't know it was the start of a new obsession at the time!) Anyway in no time at all they became very dense and a healthy looking deep green and were prolific fruiters, producing some of the biggest and sweetest strawbs I had ever eaten.

I thought it would be a shame to just bin the plants at the end of the season so I looked into overwintering online. I also produced a large number of infant plants from runners over the summer which did not fruit.

Overwintering sounded a little complex at first but turned out to be quite simple! Firstly in the autumn, well after the fruiting period I trimmed back all remaining runners that the plants had sent out. As all my plants were in pots I had to 'mulch' them, as far as I could tell, this simply means pad them out with a generous helping of straw.

Next I packed them in closely in my garage (you will need space for this) against the wall that was connected to the house (for a little extra warmth). I left them there all winter, watering a little every 3 days or so. I had no idea if it would work, having never attempted it before.

All the leaves on the regular strawberries eventually turned brown whereas some on the pineberry and white alphines stayed green. My wife thought the normal strawbs had died and I was starting to think the same but after pruning some of the brown leaves away and moving the mulch, I could see some new green shoots poking through!

Hopefully they will continue to grow and I'll be able to enjoy them again in a few months! Give it a go! You'll save money not buying new plants and feel a bit more involved in the whole grow-your-own process.

Pineberries

One year, Tasha at work saw an advert for 'Pineberries' on sale at Waitrose for £3.99 a punnet. They were a brilliant white berry with equally majestic red 'pips' and magically had the taste of pineapple. The photo that accompanied the newspaper article could have easily been photoshopped but it was the date of publication that sealed the deal - 1st April - April Fool's Day here in the UK where many UK publications, websites produce many tongue-in-check stories claiming all sorts of things currently not available in this world and this neatly fit into that category!

Tasha was mocked for years for her blunder. So imagine my surprise when I was walking past a hanging basket of Pineberry plants in Paradise Park in 2013. I apologised to her unreservedly and of course I had to purchase them.

I loving looked after them that summer and they were prolific at sending out runners. I actually produced around 15 infant Pineberry plants from the initial 3 that I purchased. Unfortunately, I didn't get a single Pineberry to sample in my first year, which was very disappointing as it is the strange fruit I want to try the most!

I am currently overwintering my plants in the hope that I get a crop this season.

As a back up plan, I looked to buy some seeds to plant and I got caught out! I found a seller on Amazon only happy to provide Pineberry seeds but when they arrived the seeds were an ordinary brown/yellow (similar to those harvested from my Alpine White) not the vivid red that make the variety famous. I immediately researched and found that even if they were genuine they would not have been successful:

http://strawberryplants.org/2013/05/are-fragaria-versca-strawberries-the-same-as-the-pineberry/#more-3662

"With the popularity of the Pineberry increasing because of its unique qualities, some less scrupulous people are renaming any white strawberry they find as the Pineberry. Pineberries are a hybrid (Fragaria x ananassa), and will not grow true from seeds."

I got a refund in the end but do not get caught out!

Homemade Labels

I finally found a use for the slightly bizarre gift of a laminator that my dad gave me years ago! Homemade plant labels. They will come in handy for the multitude of planters filled with Pineberry and ordinary Strawberry varieties that I produced from runners last year.

I grabbed some images from a google/bing search / used my own photos and used an Paint Shop Pro 9 to produce simple designs for each then simply printed them off at business card size (9 images per page) and stuck them in small laminator wallets.

Leo Alba progress

My Leo Alba seeds are progressing nicely with new leaves forming regularly, a couple of the largest leaves look like miniture versions of the mature plant leaves.
I'm really pleased with this new batch of plants as they were seeds I harvested myself and I had no idea if I had done it correctly or if they would successfully germinate.
I would definitely recommend giving it a go. I used berries at the end of the season and left the on the plant longer so they were really ripe and a little squishy. I then gently mashed them in water to free up most of the seeds and then sieved then out through kitchen roll. I then scraped the seeds onto a plate and left them in the sun on the windowsill to dry out. I placed them in a little pot, sealed with clingfilm and chucked them in the cupboard for the winter.
I am sure there was a more scientific way of doing it but it seems to have worked for me!

New Pink Lemonade bush

I also bought a new Pink Lemonade variety to partner up with the bush that my mum kindly bought me last year.

Unfortunately my existing bush didn't fruit last year but it is already showing a lot of budding this year so I am confident that I will be able to try the sweeter, hot pink berries.

I am very pleased with the new addition as it is very green with lots of budding so I may get some from this bush too. I bought the new one from Suttons Seeds.

Blueberry Bushes

I also recently purchased a bundle of 3 blueberry bushes from Suttons Seeds. The selection included a Patriot (early season), Goldtroupe (mid season) and Bluecrop (late season).

The plants were pretty small and sparse so I am not expecting any fruit in the first season but you never know, they have a few months to grow yet.

They join my existing 2 established bushed and 2 Pink Lemonade variety.

All Gold Raspberries

I had toyed with the idea of growing raspberries for some time but thought it would be far too complex for me but after chatting to a colleague whose husband was growing them I decided to give them ago.

I was told that I could grow them in containers if I used a quality soil so I grabbed some John Innes no. 3 and got stuck in.

Of course, I couldn't make do with a standard variety so I went for the autumn fruiting All Gold variety which produces a crop of sweet gold berries, I understand that they can crop in the first year so fingers crossed!

Planting Leo Alba seeds in January

I planted the Leo Alba seeds (that I harvested from berries from my own plant last season) in January 2014.

I used a standard multipurpose compost and planted around 30 seeds in a windowsill propagator.

I also planted some Red & White Alpine Strawberries, Yellow Wonder Strawberries and a selection of 6 types of tomato.

Last year's Leo Alba White Alpine Strawbs

I bought a tiny little plant at Homebase for £2. I looked after it well and it grew and grew and I got handfuls and handfuls of the small white berries.

As an experiement, I harvested seeds from a couple of berries at the end of the season, dried them out and stored them until the beginning of this year.

I am also currently overwintering the original plant.