On Your Farm

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On Your Farm: Strawberry Fields

Strawberry Fields

BBC Radio 4 - On Your Farm, Strawberry Fields

Caz Graham gets the summer started with a visit to a strawberry farm.

Caz Graham joins Annabel Makin-Jones and a team of 350 planters, pickers and packers busily trying to meet our insatiable appetite for strawberries.

A bowl of strawberries and cream is one of summer’s simple pleasures – but growing strawberries is a serious business. Annabel Makin-Jones and a team of 350 planters, pickers and packers at Sturton Grange Farm near Leeds spend five months of the year meeting our ever growing appetite for them. 

Caz Graham joins this summer’s harvest in some of the 500 polytunnels on their 180 acre site. She hears the secrets behind growing the perfect strawberry, how a week of miserable cloudy weather means a watery, less flavoursome fruit and why Annabel felt there was a gap in the market for her own brand of strawberries; they’re now on the shelves of some of the most prestigious grocers in this country, and have just been launched in Dubai so residents can enjoy Yorkshire strawberries while overlooking the Persian Gulf.   

Caz also meets Brian Bosco, the Slovakian harvest manager who has to coordinate a small army of pickers, runners and drivers and who spends his year sorting harvest logistics around the country, from Cornish daffodils in spring, through to Yorkshire strawberries in summer and Kent apples in the autumn.

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