Strawberry killer, qu’est-ce que c’est

Look, but don’t eat.

The plug was pulled on the water supply to the strawberries in September, but that didn’t stop a few hundred from ripening.

But appearances can be deceptive. Although many looked perfectly red and ripe a week after the water had been turned off, the dying leaves on the plant are a warning to potential nibblers. The berries become quite vinegary, and are definitely not suitable to grace any store or supermarket shelves.

I had a hand in their slow, creeping death as I deprived them of their final last gasp of water. You could say I administered the final, fatal blow and to quote the Breaking Bad kingpin Walter White in his final chat with Skyler – I was good at it.

As I’ve mentioned before, strawberry plants are potted in growbags or pots which are laid on racks about a metre off the ground. A water pipe runs the length of the rack and the plants are connected to the irrigation system through regularly spaced feeder tubes and drips. During the high season they are fed water several times an hour, as they don’t receive rainfall being undercover.

One of the 38,000 drips I pulled out over two days at Ford. Apologies for the state of my hands.

Demand for strawberries drops like the temperature during the autumn and there comes a point when supply far outstrips demand. So the decision was taken in mid-September to turn off the water and stop picking.

If you walk through the rows a week later you would be forgiven for thinking nothing has changed. You will see hundreds, if not thousands, of good-looking strawberries on the plants just begging to be picked, but browning leaves will be a sign that death is all around.

Removing the drips is the final blow, as it deprives the plants of the last remaining droplets of water still in the system. Sometime afterwards the plants will be ripped out of their bags and pots and taken to a compost heap, with the gaping holes being filled with new plants several months later.

I was no stranger to de-dripping as I had my first go with the previous crop in July. I was level pegging with Ryan for the first couple of hours but then – boom! – I mastered a technique and found myself leaving him and another worker for dust. They suggested I had found my calling while even Graham broke off a conversation with the pair to point out how I was wiping the floor. Graham called me “seriously fast” and suggested I could give the Romanians a run for their money on this task.

Basically one hand pulls out the drip while the other yanks it through the gap between the guide and racking towards the ground. You repeat the move quickly with the first hand already moving on to the next drip before the end of the routine.

When the plug was pulled on the autumn strawberry crop I was tasked with de-dripping every plant. That’s not far off 38,000 drips in all, but I relished the task and got it done in two days. Remember, there’s six rows of strawberries in each 80yard polytunnel, and eight polytunnels to a block, but it never seemed repetitive or boring to me. I made a challenge out of it by constantly timing myself and I’m proud to report I finished one row of pots in under ten minutes and another row of growbags, which are slightly easier to de-drip, in eight.

According to the Westlands team there’s two kinds of Paul: Pacey Paul or Peaceful Paul, so I firmly fell in the former category with this task.

Whilst we’re on the subject of killing berries, I also put most of this year’s raspberry crop to sleep. Towards the end of October I was asked to remove any berries, flowers or fresh growth from the raspberry plants in the glasshouses, effectively putting them to sleep for the winter. It was a peaceful task as I often did the pruning on my own, and it was quite satisfying opening up the vines and bringing new light to the rows.

Before and after: Deadheading the raspberry vines was a fairly time-consuming, but very satisfying job. A few weeks after this photo was taken I removed any vine which had berries or flowers, effectively putting the crop to sleep for the winter.

But it was also quite poignant given the time I spent supervising the pickers in the same tunnels just over a month before. Their work here was now done, and so was mine.

I cut the last vine at 4.29pm on Saturday, October 31, thereby ending the 2020 raspberry season at Redhill. It’s probably just as well I had a break from snipping, as I found myself dreaming of pruning raspberries every night for a fortnight.