Step-by-step guides to growing berries of all kinds in UK gardens — from soil preparation to harvesting.
These are my step-by-step guides to growing berries in a UK garden, covering soil, planting and the seasonal jobs that actually move the needle. If you only read one, start with the berries-in-season calendar to see what to plant or prune each month.
If you want a fruiting shrub that more or less looks after itself, let me put in a word for the chokeberry. I've grown a fair few "difficult" fruits over the...
Growing guide →If you've been weighing up hybrid berries for the garden, the chances are you've run into both tayberries and tummelberries and found yourself a bit stuck....
Growing guide →Huckleberries are one of those berries that sound impossibly romantic, aren't they? You picture bears ambling through Pacific Northwest forests and buckets of...
Growing guide →If you've ever grown gooseberries, you'll know the particular frustration. American gooseberry mildew coats the fruit in grey fuzz, sawfly caterpillars strip...
Growing guide →Britain's hedgerows are generous things, and most foragers soon learn to spot the friendly faces: blackberries, sloes, elderberries, wild strawberries. But...
Growing guide →I get asked this more than almost anything else, and I understand why. Blackcurrants, redcurrants and whitecurrants sound like the same berry in three coats of...
Growing guide →Yes, cranberries can be grown in the UK. They thrive in acidic, peaty soil with steady moisture — conditions that are easy to replicate in a pot of ericaceous...
Growing guide →A berry patch that hums with bees, fends off the usual pests without a single spray, and hands you heavier harvests into the bargain — that's not wishful...
Growing guide →Picture a kiwi fruit shrunk down to the size of a large grape, with smooth skin you can pop straight into your mouth, no peeling, no fuss. That little thing is...
Growing guide →The olallieberry is a blackberry hybrid bred in Oregon in the 1940s — a cross between a youngberry and a Chehalem blackberry — that produces large, jet-black...
Growing guide →Part blackberry, part raspberry, part loganberry — the boysenberry is a deeply flavoured hybrid that was once one of the most popular berries in the world, and...
Growing guide →If you've ever had Swedish meatballs with that sharp, jewel-red sauce on the side, then you've already tasted lingonberries, even if you didn't know it. These...
Growing guide →Strawberries, by a wide margin — they fruit in their first year, tolerate most soils, and forgive beginner mistakes better than currants or blueberries.
No — only blueberries and a few other acid-loving relatives need genuinely acidic soil. Most cane fruit and currants are happy in ordinary neutral garden soil.
Late autumn to early winter, while the ground is still workable and the plant is dormant, gives roots a full season to establish before next summer's growth.
