Food & Wine

Growing a fruitful family business

On a farm in west Cork, the Bushby family grow some of the country’s finest strawberries and raspberries

Lydia Bushby of Bushby's Rosscarbery: ‘Back in the 1990s, if an insect was eating your crop, you’d just annihilate it with some napalm-like chemical. Now it’s a very different world.’ Picture: Clare Keogh

The strawberry plant is a hardy buck. It’s capable of enduring substantial hardships, but when it comes to fruiting, it becomes rather more finicky. It enjoys warm summer days, but like a true Gael it suffers in higher temperatures, and relishes cool summer nights and an abundance of water.

This pretty much describes a climactic seam that runs across the south of Ireland and southern England, a regional band that has always yielded some of ...