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Of all the fruits you can grow at home, berries provide some of the biggest rewards in terms of flavour. You can’t buy a strawberry as intensely sweet as one that you grow yourself. You often can’t buy a fresh mulberry at all. As for raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, blueberries and all the other berries that come into their own in the warmest months, supermarket ones just don’t compare. Enjoying berries straight from the plant is one of the delights of late spring and summer. Swollen and sun-warmed, they offer the perfect sugary tang. Handfuls of them disappear in no time, which is good because they don’t keep well. For all their punchy flavours, berries are exceedingly thin-skinned. Easily bruised, they are vulnerable to mould and prone to turning mushy. Long-haul trucking and even short-term storage doesn’t do them any favours. But grow them yourself and you can pick them soft and eat them with their inky juices running free. Mulberries are among the first to be savoured. You might already be snacking on these sweet-tart, purple-black fruits from a branch near you. While the Black English mulberry can reach a height of 10 metres, nurseries sell a wide range of smaller varieties that are suitable for pots and are therefore easily netted to protect the fruit from birds.
