The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
Place your nets: how to make the most of your soft fruit harvest
Versatile and easy to grow, juicy black, red and white currants bring colour and flavour to puddings, jams, crumbles and cakes. By Toby Buckland
The racket and clatter as I rootle around at the back of the cupboard for the pudding bowl can mean only one thing. No, not my attempt at a jazz percussion solo, but… drum roll, please… this summer’s crop of currants is ready!
You don’t need an overwhelming weakness for cheesecake or, for that matter, much space, to justify growing the full set of red, white and black currants, as many varieties are suited to tight spaces and even life in a pot.
Once established, their high-summer harvest arrives like clockwork, offering strings of jewel-like berries and the opportunity to make sugary summer puddings and sparkling fillings for cakes, as well as both savoury sauces and homemade energy bars. And if you haven’t time to make and bake on the hoof, currants freeze as easily as ice cubes.
What I like most, though, is that like the best summer parties, their harvest just “happens”, without much effort.
One woman who knows more about currants than most is Clare Silver, a gardener at Polesden Lacey in Surrey, where they grow “six types of strawberry, five gooseberries, four blackcurrants, four raspberries (summer and autumn), red currants, white currants, boysenberry, loganberry, blackberry, Japanese wineberry, blueberries, mulberry, jostaberry and two types of honeyberry” all for use in the café’s summer fruit crumble speciality.
“Currants are delicious and very versatile,” says Clare, “and blackcurrants are high in antioxidants and vitamins, including vitamin C. They’re also relatively easy to grow in a wide variety of garden scenarios.”
A single blackcurrant can produce a 10lb load of fruit a year. That’s a lot of jam, pie and – Clare’s favourite – blackcurrant tarts, served with cream.
For further information, visit nationaltrust.org.uk/polesden-lacey
THE BEST SPOT
Currants of all colours are tough, evidenced by the fact that you’re almost certain to find one in the long grass (along with a peony) should you take on a neglected garden.
The red and white varieties will probably still be productive too, as they crop in semi-shade, but if choosing a new site, give all three as much sun as possible. Ordinary garden soil that isn’t boggy in winter is fine, and adding compost has been key at Polesden Lacey. “Our chalky soil isn’t challengingly thin,” says Clare, “but generous layers of mulch make sure plants have the best chance of establishing.” Mulch also suppresses weeds and retains moisture in the soil.
As with all fruit, shelter is also important, otherwise bees that pollinate the blooms and the frostvulnerable flowers could be killed in a spring cold snap. If frost pocket is all you’ve got, keep a protective sheet of horticultural fleece handy at flowering time.
PRUNING TIPS
Pruning currants is like riding a bike, do it once and you’ll never forget. Just remember that red and white currants fruit on old wood and blackcurrants bear best from two-year-old stems – so the more young wood, the better.
Your aim during the first few years is to create a goblet-shaped bush by pruning out any growth crowding the centre and weak/damaged stems, to leave 8-10 healthy branches.
Fruit forms inside the goblet where, thanks to the shelter, it becomes sweeter and is easy to pick.
Once established, remove two or three of the oldest branches from the framework (they’ll have peeling bark) back to the base every winter.
Replacements soon grow back and, if repeated every year, you’ll keep the whole bush below five years of age in the productive sweet spot. That’s all there is to it for blackcurrants.
With white/red currants, also winter-prune the grey branch tips that developed over summer by half, and side-shoots growing lower down the branches back to 2in berry-bearing stubs.
In early summer, follow up by snipping back the new green side-shoots to two leaves from the base to keep plants compact.
SPECIAL SHAPES
White and red currants also lend themselves to growing as cordons – permanent single or double vertical stems that occupy little space. Clare rates this technique: “We’ve started to train our red and white currants into a double cordon along a post and wire system, which increases sunshine and air flow, helps them ripen and makes it a lot easier for picking.”
As with roses, always cut just above an outwardfacing bud. Don’t leave a stub or you’ll encourage spindly growth.
BERRY UNUSUAL
When I had a nursery, we couldn’t sell jostaberries for love nor money but, far from newfangled, they’ve been around for decades.
Resembling a blackcurrant on steroids, they’re a complicated cross between a gooseberry and a blackcurrant. Growing to head height and producing an abundance of marblesized obsidian berries that taste gooseberry-ish at first, the fruit ripens to blackcurrant juiciness as they soften.
Productive and robust, the leaves are immune to American gooseberry mildew and the leaf spot and big bud mite that plague black currants.
For a variation on white currants, try ‘Gloire de Sablons’ which has fragrant, translucent pink currants with a juicy, sweet flavour. Use them to decorate cakes or make jam. (they have a high pectin content) or float in a balloon of mother’s ruin. Height and spread 4ft (kenmuir.co.uk).
SAVE SPACE
When I was renting and had a garden in containers, the 4ft tall ‘Ben Sarek’ was a winner. The plant thrived once I ditched the plastic pot (the roots cooked on hot days) for a hefty 1½ ft half-oak barrel filled with a mix of John Innes No3 and multipurpose compost.
The wooden sides kept the compost cool, and with the addition of handles (made by looping rope through holes drilled near the rim), it was easy to move about. There was also space to grow a few strawberries!
Cordon-trained plants and compact varieties of blackcurrant also work well in containers.