Ally McLaws – Living with cancer during a pandemic: How the fruits of our labour were wheeched over the fence

My health had taken a bit of a turn for the worse not long after our plants arrived so Laura stepped in as head fruit grower. Already in charge of flower growing, she displayed remarkable enthusiasm for the adoption of these little fruit plants.

I was the back-seat driver ordering bags of soil, a few large pots and some strawberry plant food. Between sleep and treatment, I watched as she planted and watered and brought the fledgling strawberry plants inside each evening to protect them from any frost.

Each morning they would be ushered back into the garden to soak up the post-frost sunshine of April and May.

As the plants developed and grew like triffids on steroids, the slugs started to appear so we bought a raised wooden trough. We also bought a pop-up netted tent to stop birds and bugs getting to our crop when it emerged.

The plants were huge – the healthiest-looking big, green things imaginable with giant leaves and loads of healthy little “babies” sprouting from the mother plants.

Now, all we awaited was for the flowers to arrive and convert to fruit. Soon I’d cancel my weekly supply of supermarket strawberries. Wimbledon came and went – supermarkets reduced the price of fresh UK strawberries because they were so plentiful and still our plants grew with not a flower or fruit to be seen.

After a consultation with a gardening book and a chat with my green-fingered sister, we realised that we had over-fed our plants – and had directed all that super-food energy directly into leaves that were now the size of elephant ears and the delivery of baby off-shoot strawberries that would overwhelm any horticultural maternity unit.

This week, the whole lot got turfed over the fence – what a waste of time and money? Not a bit of it. The garden and our strawberries can’t be quantified – certainly, we can’t quantify strawberries sd there weren’t any, not a single bloody one – but it was all worth its weight in gold when it came to our heart and souls this summer.

You see, we’ve come to realise that wakening up in the morning is good, spending time together is what it is all about.

And we still have strawberries thanks to our supermarket home delivery for just £3 a week.

Ally McLaws is a freelance specialist in writing, business marketing and reputation management. See the full range of services on offer and view all previous back issues of this column at: www.mclawsconsultancy.com