It’s berry time — time to eat mulberries or strawberries or loganberries or blueberries on sponge cakes for a Christmas treat. A strawberry-rich sponge cake is much lighter than a hunk of Christmas cake (though a rich fruitcake can’t be beaten in winter).
Soon it will be planting time — and now is the best time to think just where you might put a few blueberry bushes, goji bushes, a stretch of brambleberries, a Cape gooseberry plant or 100 strawberry plants.
All berries crop quickly and don’t take up too much space. With a little work — and a careful choice of varieties — you can be eating homegrown berries throughout temperate and most of “cold” Australia for 10 months of the year.
Best of all, most berries fruit within a year of planting. Even blueberries should give some fruit in a couple of years, if you feed and water them well.
The following varieties of berries are the most common in Australia, and are listed in order of ripening:
Goji berries:
Goji berries are said to be high in antioxidants, and good for you. They taste a little like a tough raisin, and I have them every day with my homemade muesli. The bushes grow to about 2m high and wide, and are tough. They lose their leaves in winter in cold climates and, once established, tolerate drought, heat and cold. They grow in pots, too, on a sunny balcony, in good, big, fat pots.
Mulberries:
You can rarely buy mulberries, as they turn to squish a day or so after picking. But they are luscious in pies, or just fresh from the tree, or frozen then puréed in a smoothie.
Plant the bare rooted trees in winter. Potted mulberries can be grown any time. Ours is a dwarf mulberry. It’s about 2m high and wide, and gives us buckets of fruit.
Brambleberries:
These are like blackberries, but won’t become weeds. But they are still tough, prickly, and need lots of room to ramble on, either a tall trellis or a fence to train the runners along.
Silvanberries:
Silvanberries are large, shiny, and very prickly and bear vigorous black berries. They ripen in Australia about late November and fruit from then on till early February — the longest cropping season of all the brambles. They’re sweet and luscious, but don’t have the rich raspberry hints of brambleberries. But if you’re just growing one brambleberry — and you’re sure you’ll hack it back every winter — this is a good one to choose.
Loganberries:
Loganberries are a cross between a blackberry and a dewberry. They’re a long rich red fruit, and a bit too sour to eat fresh unless you add a sprinkle of sugar or eat them with sweet cream or ice-cream. Yum! They’re wonderful in pies.
Marionberries:
The next to ripen are squishy dark-red marionberries, which have a hint of raspberry in flavour. They aren’t as vigorous as the other brambles; you usually get one flush of fruit, then no more till next year, unless the canes are very well fed and tended.
Boysenberries:
Boysenberries have a wonderful flavour, and are firm enough to store if treated gently. The plant is also very vigorous and highly recommended for any spare bit of fence.
Blackberries:
Thornless blackberries, while they do have some thorns, start to ripen here in mid-February, and keep ripening for about three weeks. They are richly flavoured, though in wet years can be soft and tasteless.
Strawberries:
We grow both the original tiny “wild” European strawberries, which have an incredibly intense taste, and the new giant Japanese ones, as well as traditional varieties like Tioga and Red Gauntlet. They all crop at slightly different times, so we eat berries for more months of the year.
Strawberry varieties. I recommend at least a few bushes of Cambridge vigour, one of the earliest to bear fruit, starting in southern New South Wales in September and continuing through to Christmas. You also get a few autumn berries if you cut back the plants in January.
Tioga, Torrey and Naratoga are also early varieties, worth diversifying with. Red gauntlet is one of the most popular strawberries. The fruits are large, though not as well flavoured as others, and the bushes crop over a very long season. If you want just one variety, this is probably it.
Growing strawberries:
Strawberries grow from the cold to the tropics, so ask your local nursery for suitable varieties. Plant them in full sunlight for the greatest number of berries with the most intense flavour, though they will survive and fruit a little in dappled shade, especially in hot summers.
