Another summer, another load of jam – my strawberries have started and after eating the first picking I decided to make some jam. All the last year’s jam is gone; I had everything ready and thanks to  Certo the result is as good as ever. There will be more later, my strawberries are a mix of very early ones and some later varieties.

I decided to cover the strawberry beds with nets because we seem to have a lot of magpies there and they like to pick the fruit – they don’t always eat what they pick, they just drop it on the ground. I think that has helped but it is rather tiring to keep lifting the net and then fixing it over the bed again. Later in the autumn I’m thinking of putting some of the strawberry plants in one of my net cages, the one in a very sunny spot, that’ll make it easier to look after them and keep the birds out too, even the squirrels. I’ve got enough of the net cages to do this (even if I should think that I might need to build another one, after all the effort of constructing all my cages it should be a piece of cake!)