I am always surprised that when it comes to growing edibles, beginners consistently seem to pick vege over fruit. Perhaps it’s because fruit bushes are more expensive than packets of vege seeds to buy. Maybe it’s due to the fact that while vege can provide you with a harvest in as little as two months, fruit can take two years. Or it could even be the perceived need for a complex and confusing pruning regime that puts newbies off. Who knows? But here is my take on why opting for fruit rather than vege can be easier, more rewarding and give you way better flavour, even if you are a total beginner.
Here’s the simple maths: sow some parsnips this spring and you will need to remove any rocks or stones from your plot, rake the earth to a fine tilth, get down on your hands and knees and sow the notoriously tricky-to-germinate seeds. Then you will need to painstakingly thin out the seedlings and weed the plot on a weekly basis. You can buy the same thing from a supermarket for less than the cost of a packet of seeds and they will taste pretty much the same. If you want a second harvest, you have to repeat the whole process every single year. For goodness sake, I am a trained botanist and I have never grown parsnips successfully.
Take 20 minutes to plant a mulberry tree or raspberry patch, however, and provided you keep it well watered for the first year or so, you will have annual harvests of fruit for the rest of your life. This, even if you ditch the pruning, netting or feeding. As the selection of fruit varieties sold by plant nurseries is far greater than in supermarkets, it also means it can give you access to flavours that are far more expensive, harder to find and sometimes literally unbuyable, too. If that sounds like a good deal to you, here are my top recommendations.
Boysenberries, to me, are the best-flavoured of all the brambles. Their lower yields means this complex Californian cross between different raspberry and blackberry species is impossible to find in supermarkets, despite their powerfully fruity, floral fragrance and rich sweet flavour. The enormous fruit of New Zealand’s own Karaka Black blackberries are so huge they look like they are digitally enhanced, yet still have the deepest, darkest fruit-cordial flavour.
If you want something more exotic, go for Chilean guavas: a strawberry-flavoured relative of the blueberry once loved by Queen Victoria.
Finally, if you want the flavour of the tropics from a hardy tree, go for one of the new dwarf mulberries, like "Charlotte Russe". They are hugely popular across Southeast Asia, from Bali to Singapore, yet will happily grow all over the place. I mean, frankly, anything other than parsnips will do.
