Easy to grow fruit plants
Soft fruit bushes are not only easy to grow for beginners but also deliver a bumper crop tasting better than anything you’ll find in the supermarket. Harvesting your own fruit is incredibly rewarding and there’s plenty of choice: blackberries, blackcurrants, blueberries, gooseberries, raspberries, redcurrant, rhubarb, strawberries, whitecurrants and more. Blackberries are easy-to-grow and pest and disease resistant, requiring less space than loganberries, making them suitable for smaller gardens. They can be trained over a pergola or arch; grown in a fan shape against a wall; or even kept in a container on the patio. Blackcurrants are delightful, generous croppers producing flowers in racemes up to 8cm long in June, followed by bunches of small, glossy dark purple-black fruits that develop along the stems in mid-summer, best harvested by hand. Blueberries are compact bushes reaching 1.5 metres tall, producing dainty white flowers in early summer, followed by an abundant summer crop of sweet and juicy fruits. Gooseberries have thorny stems, deciduous deeply lobed leaves and small, pink flushed green flowers. Gooseberries are self-fertile, reliably producing an abundance of fruit even on a single bush. See our guide to soft fruit bushes for more information.