A berry good year (From News Shopper)

A berry good year

4:31pm Wednesday 24th June 2009

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The warm weather has ripened off the strawberries in my garden to a turn. My plants are heavy with plump bright red fruit just in time for Wimbledon.

There was a time when strawberries were a real treat because the season for picking them in this country is relatively short and confined to summer. When I was a boy they represented the ultimate luxury because they were expensive to buy in the shops and we rarely ate them at home. One of the reasons I used to love going to visit my grandparents was my granddad grew strawberries in his garden and I could pick the fruit to eat with thick hand whipped cream.

Since then we have seen supermarkets take over the world and we can eat strawberries all year round. Not only that they are fairly inexpensive, despite all the miles they have travelled and it’s not unusual to see them advertised at half price or two punnets for the price of one. But these gritty flavourless bullets are imposters and the reason the sultry strawberry has become a fallen idol.

This years sun ripened crop picked from my own plants has rekindled a deep love of the strawberry that is all the sweeter for being so brief.

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