Kitchen Garden

GOOSEBERRIES

Does anyone ‘play gooseberry’ these days? The phrase originates from the Victorian era: a chaperone would pick gooseberries in the walled garden while her young charges canoodled not far off. Today not only are chaperones largely redundant but gooseberries (‘goosegogs’) seem to have lost their popularity.

Trying to reintroduce this fruit, three years ago I planted two bushes of the variety Invicta – with limited success so far. In the first year, I counted six fruit from only one bush; last year, fruit grew on both bushes but a squirrel helped itself to most of them. Earlier this year, I followed someone’s advice that gooseberry bushes like growing beneath apple trees. Fortunately I moved only one bush, which remains almost fruitless; the other, in late June, had masses of fruit and I have netted it against marauders.

There were once more than 700 varieties of gooseberry, but the majority were devastated by mildew which entered the country from America at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the oldest cultivars still available is Hero of the Nile, named to honour Nelson’s victory over the French fleet in 1798.

Most of today’s varieties are said to be resistant to mildew. The berries that turn red, such as those of Xenia and Lancashire Lad, should be sweet enough to eat straight from the bush. The best advice is to buy two-year-old bushes and plant them in late autumn about five feet apart; prune the side shoots twice a year. The gooseberry sawfly can be a problem at any time during summer; to avoid the leaves being stripped within days, spray them at the first sign of caterpillars.

Cape gooseberries – which should be called by their proper name, Physalis – came from Peru and have no connection with our gooseberries. But the plants are easily grown in an unheated greenhouse and produce one of my favourite fruits within their paper-lantern-like casing.