What a stop-start spring this has been.

A week of watery sunshine got me all Tigger-like and bouncy in anticipation that finally, at last, the winter was over. Weeds were weeded, beds were forked over, edges were trimmed.

Now it’s minus-goodness-knows-what at night again, blistering cold wind and sleeting rain all day. The allotment is under water, as is most of my garden, and I’m forced to retreat back into the greenhouse. My Tiggerish enthusiasm has flopped like a frost-stricken seedling and I’m now tending markedly towards an Eeyore frame of mind.

But it takes more than a little setback like that to keep a good gardener down. Before the weather closed in again, I managed to dig up half a dozen rooted runners of my super-reliable mid-season strawberries, ‘Cambridge Favourite’, for forcing.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t quite the right variety for producing the very earliest crops: if you’re serious about your strawberry forcing you should choose an early variety like ‘Honeoye’. I do also grow this variety on my plot but I’ve found it hasn’t settled in too well – it’s possible that the soil is a little too heavy for it, and I confess I did let them get a bit weed-suffocated last year so they weren’t exactly given the best chance. So ‘Cambridge Favourite’ it is.

Strawberries need a good spell of chilly weather to get them to initiate flowering and fruiting, so there’s no point in getting them in for forcing too early. I don’t think there’s much doubt that there’s been plenty of chilling this winter: so I’m pretty hopeful that these plants should be at just the right stage for potting up. They’re just runners which I deliberately didn’t cut off at the end of the season, instead allowing them to fall onto the ground and root where they fell: after that it’s simply a matter of digging them up carefully, snipping off the connecting runner and replanting them indoors.

I have a couple of these old tin baths kicking about – I bought them on a holiday in the Isle of Wight a few years ago after spotting them in a corner of an architectural salvage yard (my long-suffering family are quite used to me dragging back bits of old junk from holidays: it’s one of the few times I get the chance to mung about in salvage yards, which is a shame as it’s one of my all-time favourite leisure activities and a fantastic source of useful things for the garden).

The strawbs won’t be in there more than a few months so I’ve just used peat-free multi-purpose compost: I’ll start backing it up with a liquid feed as soon as they’re flowering. I reckon I’ll be eating my first fruits in around early May – a month sooner than from my crops outside. Now that’s something to look forward to.