A true symbol of The Championships, strawberries have delighted the crowds at Wimbledon for years. It seems some of the players are quite partial too.
It's 4.30am, and the happily growing Wimbledon strawberry is about to experience its personal Championships upset. It's harvest time! So goodbye to the lovely field in Kent where, since spring, the iconic berry has grown and ripened, scientifically nurtured from small white flower to plump juicy fruit by Marion Regan and her team at Hugh Lowe farms.
Marion – who runs the 480-hectare family farm with her husband Jon – was awarded an MBE last year for services to the fresh produce industry. Her great grandfather started the farm 116 years ago, so it was with generations of experience that she was initially concerned about the effect of the Championships’ new later start on the prime ripeness of her prized strawberries. “Last year, the season was early, so it could have been tricky if we had the same weather pattern for 2015,” she says. “Thankfully we had a much later spring this year so planting time was pretty spot on.”
Every day two groups of 40 pickers arrive before dawn at two fields, which are marked out with extensive lines of plastic polytunnels, housing hundreds of thousands of soft-fruit berry plants. During the tournament, more than 33 tons of strawberries are consumed – a figure that has remained consistent over the last 20 years. Every day, just over 100,000 berries go from plant to punnet to deliver the fruit at optimum quality and to satisfy one day’s consumption at the All England Club.
Last year the season was early so it could have been tricky if we had the same weather pattern for 2015
In the hush of dawn, the pickers expertly forage through the greenery, deftly removing fruit with stalk intact. They are looking for jewels of fruit that are officially ‘Wimbledon-worthy’. That is to say, they are between 25 and 45mm in diameter, fully red all over, and free of any defects.
Since the Elsanta and Sonata varieties were planted back in the spring, the tunnels have kept rain off – because rain stops play if you're a strawberry farmer too – and prevented pest damage and disease. The polytunnels are also better for pollinating insects, which means the strawberries heading to SW19 have been grown in the same spirit as the All England Club’s new bee-friendly garden features.
Along with all the others, our Wimbledon strawberry is checked once in the field and then sent to a cold store a five-minute drive away where random pallets from the morning’s pick are checked again (it’s all about attention to detail) before going into the chiller, which takes out any residual field heat. It's still dark outside when the pallets travel down a conveyor belt in the packhouse and the strawberries are sorted first into 454g punnets and then into green-and-purple Wimbledon striped boxes.
Between 7.30 and 8.30am, the refrigerated lorry sets off to answer the head of catering’s call of ‘new strawbs, please!’ Between 9 and 10am, our strawberry arrives, ready to be sent to any of the various kitchens around the site and hulled ready for eating.
The competitors’ restaurant alone gets through 500 portions a day with particular fans in Stan Wawrinka, Nick Kyrgios, Lucie Safarova and the Bryan Brothers. Simona Halep gets through three bowls a day, Ekaterina Makarova confesses to two portions a day while Karolina Pliskova eats them with cream (despite her coach's disapproval!).
