Discover guides on growing, foraging, and cooking with berries across the UK.
If you only ever make one jam in your life, let it be blackcurrant. I grow my own bushes, and every summer there comes a morning when the fruit is so glossy...
See recipe →One of the questions I get asked most often, in one form or another, is simply "what should I be picking right now?" It's a fair question — between garden...
Growing guide →The wild strawberry is, by almost any measure, a better strawberry than the ones you buy in shops. It's smaller — often barely the size of a fingernail — and...
Foraging guide →Every September the elder trees around here turn from something I barely notice to something I can't stop looking at — heavy black clusters hanging over every...
See recipe →Quick answer: the berries most likely to poison you in a UK hedgerow are deadly nightshade (glossy black, single berries, star-shaped calyx), woody nightshade...
Foraging guide →Most "unusual berries" articles cover the same six plants and stop there. I've actually grown or written up nearly every berry a British gardener can...
Growing guide →You've decided to grow a loganberry — good decision, and my complete growing guide will take you from planting hole to first harvest. But first you need an...
Growing guide →Every July I get the same question over the garden fence: how do you actually know when a loganberry is ready? It looks ripe for a fortnight before it is ripe,...
Growing guide →If your only experience of blackberries is scrambling along a hedgerow in September, sleeves snagged and fingers stained purple, then a thornless cultivated...
Read article →If you grow strawberries, you've probably watched your plants throw out long, wandering stems in high summer, each one carrying a little plantlet at its tip....
Read article →Blackcurrants are one of the most rewarding soft fruits you can grow in a British garden. They are fully hardy, reliably productive, tolerant of most soils,...
Growing guide →The dewberry (Rubus caesius) is a native British wild berry that grows in hedgerows, clifftops, sand dunes and chalk grassland throughout the UK, ripening...
Foraging guide →
