Apunnet of freshly picked strawberries, red, ripe and bursting with sugary juices… it’s a taste memory from a bygone age. At least, that’s how it feels every time you bite into the bland, bullet-hard supermarket varieties. In fact, the British berries that encapsulate the taste of summer are ripening to perfection on a bush near you right now: strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries and currants, plump, sweet and there for the plucking at a local pick-your-own (PYO) farm.
West Craigie, a 260-acre arable holding six miles from Edinburgh, is one such venue. It’s the home of tenant farmer John Sinclair, who followed his father into soft-fruit growing in the late 1980s as a diversification from a no-longer-viable dairy-farming business. He grows more than 40,000 tonnes of fruit, including strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, tayberries, redcurrants…
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The Simple Things (Digital) - 1 Issue, 01-Jul-2015