Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
i'm Julian Mead I farm
near Colchester, essex
my brother Alistair and my wife Kim, We've been farming fruit since before the second world war
before the second world war
we started farming apples, steadily moving
more and more into soft fruit where we have an edge great we're able to produce
high-quality fruit that customers that
really want to buy. We like
to pick the strawberries when they are fully red that means it has
really good flavour. Picketer go through to select the best berries, they are picked put into a punnet
and they go back to a cold store to be chilled before they are packed ready for sale
picking starts
in the summer
normally six o'clock in the morning we like to
pick the fruit when it's cool
the quality stays with the fruit
the pickers are happier because it's not hot in the tunnels
in the old days the strawberry season was about four weeks
steadily the the season has been extended
so now we are picking
from April
until mid november. What we do is we take different varieties and we use
different strawberry growing materials
to extend the season. We are able to
manipulates manipulate a strawberry
as to when it crops
with a sixty-day plant for example
we can take a plant that is frozen, its been grown especially
for this use and
we decided when we want to pick that plant and
we worked back sixty days form the time we want to crop
we also for a number of different varieties for different
parts of the season
all of our strawberries are grown under polythene. The strawberry
needs to be pollinated so there's less insects to pollinate in a tunnel environment
also very early in the year
there's not a lot of bees around so we
bring in bees from
specialist companies that make
hives that have a certain amount of bumble bees in them and the bees will pollinate the crop. We attend
parliament hill
and Queens Park farmers market
my brother looks after the parliament hill market
I grow strawberries of my own
they're rubbishy tiny things mostly because my daughter loves them
but they don't come for ages in an english summer it could be anytime, August. IO don't know if he has poly tunnels
or anything like that but
he's a top strawberry grower and the varieties change all the time and they are always loverly. It keeps Kitty going
until we get to the toddler park, sausages from over there and
strawberries from over here
but they are lovely and he's a lovely man and they taste great
He use to do misshaped ones slightly cheaper
they were a quid for a punnet. Who cares what a strawberry looks like apart from Tesco
I love it