Growing berries in pots and containers

Cranberry Pilgrim from London Plantology

Cranberry Pilgrim
Image source: London Plantology

You don’t need a huge garden to grow your own fruit. In fact, berries are the perfect container crop for small spaces. Think wild strawberries in window boxes, trailing blackberries overflowing from hanging baskets and blueberries in pots on the patio. Not only will your container-grown berries provide colour, scent and interest throughout the summer, but you’ll also enjoy a wonderful harvest with which to make delicious jams and cordials to see you through the winter!

Here, blogger Sasha Ivanova shares her advice on the best berries to grow in a container garden. Browse our full range of fruit plants for even more inspiration.

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Strawberry Tarts

Strawberry Tarts

Strawberry Tarts

Avatar photoThompson & Morgan
Enjoy this simple, fresh fruit treat whislt reaping the rewards of your home grown crop. An excellent addition to any afternoon tea selection.
Prep Time 30 minutes
Cook Time 25 minutes
Total Time 55 minutes
Course Dessert
Servings 4 tarts
Calories 590 kcal

Ingredients
  

Instructions
 

  • Pre-heat the oven to 180C/160C fan. Sprinkle flour on a clean surface and roll our the pastry to a maximum of half a cm thick. Put a small bowl or saucer on the pastry and cut round it with a sharp knife to make 4 circles. Use one circle to line each tart tin. Press in firmly and cut off any excess pastry.
  • In each tin, top the pastry with some greaseproof paper or baking paper and add a lyer of rice or baking beans. Put the tarts in the oven for 25 minutes. Remove from the oven, take off the greaseproof paper and rice/baking beans. Leave to the side to cool.
  • Put the cream in a bowl and whisk the cream until it starts to get thick. Now stir in the lemon curd.
  • Wash the strawberries, remove the green tops and cut the fruit into slices.
  • Divide the lemon cream into the 4 pastry cases. Layer the strawberries in a spiral on top.
  • Combine the jam and 1 tbsp hot water in a bowl, mix together and then brush it over the strawberries as a glaze. Garnish with a mint leaf, serve and enjoy

Nutrition

Calories: 590kcal
Keyword fruit, strawberry, tart
Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!

A Life in the Garden of….Suffolk businessman, Jeremy Scowsill

Ipswich-based property developer doubles as self-sufficient organic gardener

 

Isn’t it funny how, at a certain age, you realise that many of the people you’ve known for years have apparently ‘suddenly’ got into gardening? I’m not sure if it’s actually an age thing – it clearly isn’t as the growing number of young gardening bloggers shows – or just the fact that you’re hearing more about your friends’ gardens and seeing the results of their gardening endeavours thanks to social media.

I recently noticed that an old friend (‘less of the old’, he’ll say!) was posting some amazing pictures of his garden and the things he’s been growing on Instagram (@jemsgardening). I’ve known Jeremy and his wife Julia for years, since our children were in junior school, and as far as I knew, Jeremy was a very busy businessman, and not someone I’d imagined digging a veg patch or pottering in a potting shed, so I got in touch to find out more.

I started by asking Jeremy when he’d got interested in gardening? I was interested to find out if it was a new thing for him or if he’d gardened with his parents or a grandparent?

“I really started gardening about fifteen years ago. When I was a child, my father grew some vegetables and fruit, but I was more interested in getting him to play football with me than actually helping him in the garden! I did a day’s gardening course some years ago with my wife Julia, and having eaten the freshly-grown food as part of the day, we realised that home-grown food is just so much tastier than shop-bought food. So it’s fair to say that my real interest started in my adult years.”

Jeremy lives in a lovely house just outside Ipswich in Suffolk and I wondered if he had laid out his beautiful kitchen garden or if it had already been there when he and his family moved in.

“I actually started with just a small area of the garden where I planted some herbs, along with a few simple salad and vegetable seeds. I quickly learnt some simple lessons – like don’t plant mint without restricting it! Although the amount of produce was initially small, it was, as I’d hoped, so much tastier than anything we could buy and I quickly became hooked. After a couple of years, I had outgrown my mini-plot and decided to convert the old ‘kitchen garden’ back to its original use. I prepared a simple plan on paper, creating a design of raised beds and fruit cages. I already had a greenhouse (actually a vinery) with a mature grape vine inside – but this was just loads of work and produced grapes that I am sure would have made excellent wine, but really weren’t sweet enough to eat raw. So I took out the vine and installed some simple wooden benches. This became my working area under glass, although controlling the heat was a bit of a problem on occasions. About three years ago, we built a potting shed which gave me a few more options and took the messy side of gardening away from the garden itself.

I had seen from Jeremy’s social media posts that he was gardening organically and so I asked him if he’d set out right from the start to keep his garden organic and what his motives were.

“I definitely set out to garden organically as it was quite clear that shop-bought salad leaves in particular simply don’t stay fresh without some fairly serious ‘additives’ being applied. Knowing more about what we were eating as a family and knowing how it had been grown suddenly became more important to me. There has been the odd occasion over the last fifteen years where I have resorted to using a non-natural pesticide, but this is now pretty rare. I think the only times I have resorted to chemicals is when I have been confined by time – as I am still pretty busy with work – or if I really can’t deal with the issue with an effective natural or organic solution.”

I wondered which were Jeremy’s favourite vegetables to grow and which he finds to be the most successful.

“In my earlier gardening years, I tried growing all sorts of things and whilst I am always experimenting, the basic premise is that I only grow things that we as a family want to eat. So there are a few things we no longer grow at all, although I have been known to grow things just because they look nice! My standard year’s crop would comprise about five varieties of lettuce, four or five different varieties of tomato, cucumbers, beetroot, onions, shallots, broad beans, sweetcorn, artichokes, leeks, aubergines, various varieties of squash, marrows and spinach. I rarely grow carrots as my predominantly clay soil is not conducive to growing good carrots – and to get the right conditions for them will require a bit of extra hard work – which will have to wait until I have a bit more time to spare! I also have a bed which provides a constant supply of fresh herbs.”

Jeremy says that he also grows lots of fruit…and has time to grow and maintain a wonderful cutting garden.

“I have fruit cages where I grow redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, tayberries and some cultivated blackberries. We have some apple and plum trees in the garden which I largely leave to their own devices – pruning probably every three years, rather than yearly which I would definitely not recommend, but I do get a good crop from them occasionally!”

“As well as growing flowers in the cutting garden, we deliberately allow certain of our vegetables to go to seed to produce wonderful seed heads which we combine with other flowers from the garden to decorate indoors. Leeks and artichokes are our favourites for this.”

I was interested to know how Jeremy and his wife, Julia, managed the gardening chores – including dealing with their abundant crops.

“Julia and I share the bottling, blanching, freezing and preserving of our crops – whatever we don’t eat! We live off salads in the summer and always have a bowl of Sungold tomatoes available for ‘Scooby snacks’ from July to October. If there was one thing I would recommend growing lots of, it would be these – they are just like sweets and you don’t feel guilty eating them!”

Knowing that Jeremy is generally busy with a number of business projects on the go at once, I asked him how much time he is able to spend in the garden.

“Depending on the weather, I probably spend about six or seven hours a week in the garden between March to October. I do have some help at the end of the season when we have a clear-up and dig in our own compost, which we carefully create over a two to three year period.”

He adds:

“I find gardening a very relaxing pastime – watching things grow and sometimes helping them along if they’re struggling, is very therapeutic. Sometimes I put on some music or listen to some sport while I’m gardening; other times, I just use it for thinking time. It entirely depends upon my mood and how much time I have available. It is without question a de-stressing time of the day for me and, except during periods of really bad weather, I will usually make at least two trips out to the garden during the day to either do something specific, or just to potter!”

A big thank you to Jeremy and we look forward to hearing more from him. All the images in the blog are from Jeremy’s instagram account @jemsgardening

Fuchsia Berry Part 2

Hi again.

It’s been a rather busy six months for me. I can’t quite see where my time has gone. Well, I say that, I spent a lot of it working in my client gardens. Unfortunately, this meant that I wasn’t able to look after my own pots as much as I’d have liked to. It certainly put the Fuchsia Berry to the Test! It really grew lots over the summer and it bloomed lovely to my surprise.

Fuchsia Berry Plant

I had my first Berries from the plant in July. Albeit only a few. Never the less, I had berries and my first victims, umm I mean candidates, to try the berries and the flowers (along with myself) were my parents and my guinea pig. I wish I had been able to record my parent’s reactions, they were priceless! I did get a snap of Oscar trying his. He wasn’t too sure.

Guinea pig eating fuchsia flower

(I will apologise if you have been following me on twitter as I am using the same pictures in this blog as I have published on there!)

We all tried the flowers first. I ate each piece individually, which is probably best when you first try them as each bit tastes different. Mum on the other hand put the whole thing in in one go and then proceeded to proclaim, while screwing her face up ‘how could you give me something so foul! You evil child!’ All in jest of course. My dad had played the tactical game waiting for our responses before he would dare to try it. Now he was a little put off by mum’s reaction but I managed to get him to try a bit and after a few small bites he said he didn’t mind it but wouldn’t rush to have another one.
The berries were a different story. We all enjoyed them and I got my Grandad to try some when I had a few more and gave him some to take home to nanny for her to try. They never made it home. I don’t think they even made it out of the door!

fuchsia berries

The berries to me taste like a cross between a blueberry and a grape. The skin has a slightly bitter taste but that maybe because I was feeding my plant with Worm Tea from my wormery.
Over the next few months I trapped more people into trying my berries. Nearly everyone who I asked to try them were dubious whether I was trying to poison them. Ye of little faith! Of course, I promised the I wasn’t and I ate them in front of them to prove that I was going to be poisoned as much as they were. Their responses were much the same as mine. They either said blueberry or grape or a mix of the two.

When it came to the flowers though a few really protested that you can’t eat Fuchsia flowers. Even with me eating them in front of them and explaining that Thompson and Morgan have tested it and verified it is safe they still wouldn’t. Those who did try them had a similar response to my dad. Although they did say that it wasn’t what they were expecting but they did taste ok and would eat them again if they were on their plate.

fuchsia flowers

I think the reason why the flowers got such a bad reaction from my mum and an alternative reaction from others that tried them was because they don’t taste anything like you expect them to. They trick you. Being the hot pink and purple that they are, you expect them to be sweet like most other things of their colouring are. But don’t be fooled. When in their prime picking season, mid-summer, the stamens have a fiery kick to them, like pepper crossed with chilli and the petals and bracts taste like rocket and red mustard leaves. If you want to give your salad an exotic twist this is certainly the thing to do it with.

It was my mum’s birthday in August so, being the good daughter that I am, I made her a birthday cake. Chocolate sponge with chocolate fudge icing and chocolate sprinkle and sugar flowers. Pretty eurgh if you ask me, but then I don’t really like chocolate. More of a tomato girl. Any way just before I lit the candles and we sung the obligatory ‘Happy Birthday’ I went out into the garden and picked some Flowers along with some of my home-grown strawberries to finish the cake off. I think they added that extra little bit of pizzazz! Although mum still wouldn’t eat them even with Chocolate fudge icing on them.

cakes

The Fuchsia Berry is certainly a good conversation starter and this year I hope to see if feeding it sugar water makes a difference to how it tastes. But for now, it is tucked up in fleece inside my heated greenhouse.

I wish you all a Happy New Year and a prosperous and plentiful growing season to come,

Smile,

Lesley

Looking Forward to 2017

Petunia 'Night Sky and Bidens 'Firelight' mixed
Time moves on so quickly and 2017 will be the 5th year that I have been trialling plants for Thompson & Morgan in my multi-award winning seaside garden! Back in 2013, the first items I received were a Cox’s orange Pippin Apple Tree and a Plum Gage, Reine Claude. Back then we were sent whatever was chosen by the company and I feared that I would not be able to use then in my exposed coastal garden. Now, they are both established and have started to produce small amounts of fruit, always difficult here on the coast, with the wind blowing across the garden!

Another arrival that first Spring was a delicate rose ‘garden party’, which still flowers profusely in the front and back garden each Summer. Also received in the first year were Peruvian Tree Lily, Alstroemeria ‘Everest Collection’. These have been quite stunning year on year and much remarked on by our many garden visitors. They were all planted in a large container and are still doing really well. Last Summer, I was very lucky indeed to have trialled 2 brand new 2017 plants, featured in the Spring catalogue. The stunning new fuchsia ‘Icing Sugar’ on the front cover and the equally beautiful Bidens ‘Firelight’ on page 11. I’d suggested 2 names for the plants, but I’m afraid they weren’t the final ones chosen! However, my quote on the Fuchsia was used in publicity last November.

Fuchsia 'Icing Sugar' Alstroemeria 'Everest Collection', Bidens 'Firelight'

“Geoff Stonebanks, gardening writer, blogger and creator/owner of The Driftwood Garden near Lewes in Sussex, trialled ‘Icing Sugar’ for T&M last year and says: “The beautiful new fuchsia, ‘Icing Sugar’, certainly lives up to its name; a delicate and frosted gem.” Geoff added: “As an avid fuchsia lover, this delicate and frosted ‘Icing Sugar’, on show in my garden for the first time this summer, is utterly stunning.”

Both of these plants are ones I would heartily recommend for anyone’s garden this Summer.

So, what can I and my garden visitors look forward to seeing in 2017 from Thompson & Morgan? We’re set to open 14 times this summer and already have several coach trips booked into the garden as well, as a result of me and the garden being seen on BBC Gardeners’ World last Autumn. Here’s what we will be receiving in the next few months. Strawberry ‘Just Add Cream™’. Petunia Amore ‘Queen of Hearts’, Buddleja davidii ‘Wisteria Lane’, Geranium ‘Black Rose’, Osteospermum ‘Falling Stars’. Gazania ‘Shepherd’s Delight’, Calendula ‘Winter Wonders Collection’. Petunia ‘Mini Rosebud Romantic Peachy’, Sweet Pea ‘Earl Grey’ and finally Petunia ‘Night Sky’ again, as it was such a success in 2016.

Petunia 'Night Sky', Strawberry 'Just Add Cream', Sweet Pea 'Earl Grey'

The information both on-line and in the Spring catalogue certainly made me want to see these on show in the garden. Who could resist the chance to smell the intense perfume that evokes childhood memories of your first taste of a strawberry or appreciate the fashionable new sweet pea, offering stunning colour on both sides of the graduated or ‘flaked’ petals. I’m really looking forward to seeing how they all grow this Summer and will be posting update son my garden web site throughout the season. Check them out at wwww.driftwoodbysea.co.uk

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