Healthy Fruit Gooseberry

The gooseberry is a straggling bush growing to 1.5 metres  in height and width, the branches being thickly set with sharp spines, standing out singly or in diverging tufts of two or three from the bases of the short spurs or lateral leaf shoots. The bell-shaped flowers are produced, singly or in pairs, from the groups of rounded, deeply crenated 3 or 5 lobed leaves. The fruit are berries, smaller in wild gooseberries than the cultivated varieties, but often of good flavour; it is generally hairy, but in one variety smooth, constituting the R. uva-crispa of writers. The colour of the berries is usually green, but there are red , yellow, and white variants. 

Ribes hirtellum fruit can be green or dark purple to black . Heavy nitrogen composting must be avoided as too much nitrogen will produce extensive growth and weaken the bush.

 This will make the bush susceptible to mildew. The fruit should best be picked off when large to reach maximum sweetness. Supermarkets tend to have theirs picked early and before they are ripe and sweet to give a long shelf life. Heavily laden branches should be cut off complete with berries, this really benefits future crops as it lets the light reach the new growth. Cultivar 'Invicta' now is a popular green gooseberry which has some mildew resistance. Of the many hundred sorts enumerated in recent horticultural works, few perhaps equal in flavour some of the older denizens of the fruit-garden, such as the Old Rough Red and Hairy Amber. 

 

The climate of the British Isles seems peculiarly adapted to bring the gooseberry to perfection, and it may be grown successfully even in the most northern parts of Scotland; indeed, the flavour of the fruit is said to improve with increasing latitude. In Norway even, the bush flourishes in gardens on the west coast nearly up to the Arctic Circle, and it is found wild as far north as 63°. The dry summers of the French and German plains are less suited to it, though it is grown in some hilly districts with tolerable success. 

The gooseberry in the south of England will grow well in cool situations and may sometimes be seen in gardens near London flourishing under the partial shade of apple trees, but in the north it needs full exposure to the sun to bring the fruit to perfection. It will succeed in almost any soil but prefers a rich loam or black alluvium, and, though naturally a plant of rather dry places, will do well in moist land, if drained.