When it comes to growing edible plants, market research has shown that home gardeners are still far more interested in growing vegetables than fruit. Perhaps – because most vegetables are annuals – it is the promise of faster results. Or maybe it’s down to perceived cost – after all, vegetable seeds are far cheaper to buy than fruit bushes or trees. Or maybe it’s just that people are put off by all the complex pruning rules…
However, if it is maximum reward for minimum cost and in minimum space that you are after, fruit beats vegetables hands down by almost every measure. For starters, most fruit bushes are perennial, so will come back year after year without significant extra cost or effort. Add this to the fact that, generally, their harvests cost more to buy, too. So, with this in mind, here’s my take on the best fruiting plants for small patches, all of which you can plant right now.
If you are looking for the easiest of all fruit to grow, it would be hard to find a better example than the wild strawberry. Containing a whopping five times the sugar of the traditional cultivated variety, plus a far heftier dose of aroma compounds, each tiny fruit is so intensely flavoured, it’s like biting into living confectionary. Unlike regular strawberries, they don’t produce those pesky runners that need constant trimming or replanting, either. They will even fruit well in shady spaces where most fruit plants would not be happy.
As their fruit are, at best, thumbnail-sized, you will need to plant quite a few to get a decent harvest. However, considering they are extremely cheap to propagate from seed (each packet will produce 100 plants or more) and can be crammed in as underplanting in any gap in a bed, pot or border, this is surprisingly easy to do.
Sticking with berries that grow well in shade, raspberries are an excellent candidate, too. A new generation of dwarf varieties means you can grow them easily even if all you have are pots. ‘Ruby Falls’ has to be the best contender here, producing good yields on plants no more than 1m high. They don’t have thorns or require staking, either, which is a real godsend.
If you have a little more space to play with, the weird, purple-coloured fruit of ‘Glen Coe’ have a wonderful fusion of classic blackberry and raspberry flavour. They grow on thornless, silvery blue stems. They are vigorous and will grow fairly tall without a few snips of the secateurs, but they will happily live in a 1m-wide border without spreading laterally.
Lastly, I have to give a shout out to the boysenberry, probably the least grown of the traditional berries, yet undoubtedly the tastiest. This complex, intergenerational hybrid of a range of different bramble species, including both raspberries, blackberries and more exotic species like the American dewberry, is essentially unbuyable in supermarkets due to its short shelf life and low yields. But it has a flavour, both in terms of aromatic intensity and sweetness, like no other. It’s as if someone injected them with blackberry jam and raspberry cordial. There are now thornless varieties, too, and none will take up much room. I’d say it was an absolute must-grow.
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