Hot weather sees Kenyon Hall Farm run out of fruit - but it is great news for pumpkin lovers

Tod Bulmer who owns Kenyon Hall Farm, in Croft, said it has been a struggle to harvest soft fruit, including raspberries and strawberries, with the crops arriving, ripening and needing to be picked much earlier than usual.

The berry season normally lasts until late September, however the last of the farm's strawberries were harvested around three weeks ago.

Tod, who runs Kenyon Hall Farm on Winwick Road, with wife Barbara, said: "The problem with this year's soft fruit crop has been a combination of the shockingly wet, late summer, autumn, winter and spring coupled with the really wonderful nice, dry spell of weather we have just had.

"It is exceptional, the last time this happened was 1976 and we weren't even growing fruit then.

"Before this happened, we had already decided that in order to give us a greater spread of season and more reliability of fruit, that we were going to have to go all modern and start growing some of our fruit under polythene in Spanish tunnels on tabletops so that it's easy for people to pick.

"And this has just proved that we should have done that last year, not next year.

"So we are all the more determined to get on and bring ourselves up to the 21st century.

"We'll continue to grow some outside but it will enable us to give some of the fields that have grown strawberries lots of times a bit more of a rest in between crops."

But it isn't all bad news, as Tod explains that some of the farm's crops have actually benefitted from the spell of warm weather.

He said: "Just to show that every cloud has a silver lining, we've been able to open our Maize Maze two or three weeks earlier than we normally do and our crop of pumpkins looks absolutely magnificent, because they are crops that enjoy the hot, dry weather.

"They come from countries whose climate is slightly warmer and drier than ours, so in a wet year they do badly and this year they've done fantastically well."