Over the last 10 years, the soft fruit crops have grown from a simple bed of rhubarb to a pretty sophisticated set-up with irrigation, cages, and a wide range of varieties producing around a staggering 1300lbs of fruit each year. Find out more from Soft Fruit Team Leader, Helen, about the work of the team.
Establishing soft fruit
Fruit started at the Farm very simply. A rhubarb patch was started where the Herb Garden is now, using spares from members’ allotments. The first fruit cage was just a part of the raspberry cage that we have today. It contained raspberries, gooseberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, and whitecurrants and a few strawberries. We have still have plants today from cuttings of those original bushes, except the whitecurrants which didn’t produce.
In 2015, HCF took over the land where the soft fruit is now and Andrew Ross started the original Fruit team. This kicked off two years of preparing the ground, preparing cages, establishing a drip irrigation system, and planting bushes. In 2017, the original rhubarb patch moved to a new home in the Soft Fruit area and other fruit crops developed around it.
A devastating lightning strike in 2019 destroyed the shed and took the nearby fruit cage and bushes with it. Falling bits of burning debris made things even worse. The team was down but not out. They cleared the mess, a new shed opened in 2020 and, since then, the Soft Fruit team has gone from strength to strength.
The team
The team is 11 people, led by Helen Ridley.
Unlike the vegetable plots where the crops rotate and teams learn about new crops with each new year, the Soft Fruit team is more specialist. Team members are encouraged to take ongoing responsibility for a crop and learn about that crop over time.
The team harvests non-stop between February and October – with July being a particularly critical month. They record the volume of fruit that they harvest so that they can see the performance of different crops, year-to-year. (You can see the summary from 2022 to now further on.) Between harvesting, the team maintains the fruit cages and internal plant supports, maintains paths around the cages, mulches the beds and deals with weeds.
The fruit
Let’s take a closer look at what the team produces. It’s well over a thousand pounds of fruit each year!
Blackberries
We’re all familiar with this hedgerow fruit. Even if you normally pick a good crop from local brambles, the Loch Ness variety produces large, sweet berries that are well worth a try. The team is expecting a good harvest this year from 9 new plants.
Blackcurrants
There are 25 blackcurrant bushes, 18 of which are the UK’s most popular variety of blackcurrants, Ben Hope. We’ve enjoyed a huge harvest from these – and thanks to people from other teams who joined in getting the bumper crop off the bushes.
Boysenberries
You probably won’t find these in the shops. Their thin skins make them difficult to transport but you’ll enjoy their rich, jammy flavour.
They are a mix of a European raspberry, a European blackberry, American dewberry (a species of blackberry), and a loganberry and their name comes from the man who developed them – one Rudolph Boysen.
Gooseberries
Thorny bushes don’t make it easy to get the fruit but we’re glad of the sharp green berries (Leveller and Invicta) and their slightly sweeter red variety (Hinomaki Red). They can be plagued by gooseberry sawfly that strips the bush of its leaves, leading to a poor crop.
Raspberries
We have Glen Ample summer and some unknown autumn varieties. Most patches are doing well, although there are a few stragglers.
Redcurrants
These tart little berries made a poor harvest this year. The bushes needed a heavy prune last year and we didn’t feed with manure which could possibly have contributed. We visited RHS Wisley and found that they cordon the redcurrants (pruning to one main stem with short, fruiting side-shoots). Redcurrants can grow on old wood for 10 years, we were told, so we will experiment with this.
Rhubarb
The plants are looking healthier now after a dip in June. The rhubarb is especially welcome in Spring when not many other fresh fruits and veg are available. We’ve had success in forcing the rhubarb , bringing us beautiful rosy spears early in the year. [Ed: we know that rhubarb is actually a vegetable but since most of us think of it with crumbles and fools rather than roast dinners or pasta, we’ll roll with its common association with fruit.]
Strawberries
We didn’t have a good harvest this year, possibly not enough feeding, too many runners last year, too much woodchip, or the cold wet Spring – but strawberries are very widely available outside the Farm so perhaps less missed than some of the more exclusive fruits.
Tayberries and loganberries
These are crosses between red raspberries and blackberries, with the loganberry crossing continents as a hybrid of North American blackberry and European raspberry. Like the boysenberry, the fruit is very soft and can only be harvested by hand so it’s not popular commercially. Both tayberry and loganberry have a fabulous aromatic flavour, with the loganberry being slightly sharper.
Raspberry cane spot is a fungal disease and we had to prune hard last year to try to eliminate it. As a result, it’s likely to be a poor harvest this year.
Adding it all up
Find out more
If you’re interested to know more about the HCF soft fruit, contact Helen. If you head over to the Soft Fruit area, there are team members working on different days and all will be happy to show you around