Seasonal Update!

As the evenings begin to draw in and as November appears on the horizon our farm workers are still hard at work preparing a whole host of strawberry delights to share with everyone!

The strawberry season started a little later this year due to a chillier winter and some frosty spring weather in April, which helped strawberry flowering and ripening to occur a little more gradually which means our fruit have been larger, juicier but importantly just as tasty. Don’t just take our word for it, here are a few comments that we received throughout the year from those in the know!

“I bought a punnet of your strawberries last Friday.  Wow they are the best strawberries I have tasted for a long time.  They actually tasted like strawberries, not too sweet and really juicy and big.  We are finishing off the punnet today and the strawberries have not gone soft or marked. Great British strawberries.”

Or how about this cracker…

“I bought a pack of your Malling Centenary strawberries. They are the best. Very fresh. All a lovely colour, good shape, even size. Good flavour.  Very well grown. Very well picked. Thank you.”

Appetite for fresh strawberries shows little sign of cooling and over the past twelve months, shoppers spent almost £800 million on strawberries in the UK, delivering double digit value growth on the previous year. The volume of strawberries purchased reached approximately 150 thousand tonnes in total.

From May to October UK strawberry growers supply the entire UK shopper demand for strawberries and approximately 70 per cent of all strawberries grown in the UK are now grown and produced on British farms!

Strawberries have the biggest market share across fresh berries, making up just under half of all sales in the UK and they continue to be one of the most popular fruit items in shoppers’ baskets.

This year our farms experienced a busy and productive fresh new spring glasshouse season and a full tunnel season picking Favori and Murano over the summer where we produced excellent like for like yield increases. In the last few weeks as the weather turns cooler, focus has returned to the strawberry crops growing in our glasshouses and the outdoor season is wrapped up – which means we all get to benefit from a few more weeks of wonderful British strawberries – in fact they’ll continue to produce fruit right up until the middle of December!

The Malling Centenary variety we grow in our glasshouse are well known for producing large and uniform berries, which our pickers find so quick and easy to pick but this variety also continues to deliver a remarkable flavour and consistent quality throughout the season with a huge amount picked every day to satisfy our customers’ demand. Glasshouse yields have also been good resulting in an increase in tonnage.

As well as picking in the glasshouse there are plenty of jobs that our teams have been busy doing – the plants that we grow are naturally large and leafy so we do a lot of tucking of leaves and runners to make sure we can pick all the lovely fruit as it ripens. We plan to pick from our glasshouses until mid-December, using biomass heat to maintain optimised conditions to produce great quality strawberries until the end of the season. From mid-December our plants get a well-earned rest as the biomass heat is switched off and the plants go to sleep until the end of January when the heat is switched back on and the season restarts.

As the tunnel crop has finished due to recent low temperatures in early November there are plenty of maintenance tasks to do outside in the autumn to help bring the outdoor season to a close and ensure everything is in tip top condition for the seasons ahead. Our farm workers are removing plants from tunnels, removing the skin from the polytunnels, cleaning the gutters and placing new bags for next March’s planting schedule.

Our tunnel yields have also been producing excellent results throughout the year with our strawberry plants producing a larger like-for-like harvest this year. Using enhanced growing techniques, we have produced a further 50 tonnes of delicious Norfolk Strawberries versus the year before.

We have also been thrilled to welcome many of our farm workers from the Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria and Romania this year who have been working with us for much of the glasshouse and tunnel seasons and who help get our wonderful strawberries grown, picked and packed for our customers.

We also look forward to sharing some exciting news with you in the future, all of which is currently in the pipeline! Be sure to check back in as we’ll be updating any farm developments as and when they happen!