Autumn is well and truly over, and it’s time to start tidying up the fruit beds. Most specifically, the currant bushes.
We don’t have many – one blackcurrant, one redcurrant and a raspberry, sitting in a bed with the crab apple tree. This is the first year they’ve produced any fruit, but the results weren’t very impressive. The raspberries were sparse, the blackcurrants sparser, and the redcurrants almost non-existent.
That could be because they’re all so young and were still getting themselves established this year, so despite their disappointing performance we’re keeping our fingers crossed for next summer and doing all we can to help them along. Most specifically pruning.
The best fruit on plants of this kind grows on the younger branches, so every autumn you need to give them a harsh pruning, taking the new growth down to about 10 centimetres from the top of the soil.
It’s easy to see where this is on the blackcurrant and redcurrant plants as the older wood, which will be where this year’s new growth will have started, will be almost black on the outside. The new growth, on the other hand, will be brown. You can see this in the picture above.
So I headed out with the secateurs to trim them down, and picked off the last few raspberries, which hadn’t ripened, and gave them to the chickens, who gobbled them up in an instant.
The results are neat, if rather harsh and stark, and I’m hoping it will do the trick. Enough fruit for a little salad, or a pot of jam, would make it all worthwhile.
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Thanks for the info on pruning; I’m curious to know how your bushes did this summer, specifically the blackcurrants. Did you have a higher yeild this year? We had quite a few but I don’t know what to do with the bushes now. I’m also looking forward to the liqueur that I just bottled!
This year’s blackcurrant crop was much stronger than last year. We got enough to make a good liqueur, and we could probably have made a home-made Ribena, too, if we wanted, but the redcurrant bush was a big disappointment. No fruit at all. As such, it’s going to come out at the end of the season to make room for some raspberry bushes that we want to move.
Pruning, i don’t fall into the trap the so called experts tell you to prune. I go for the natural let the bush grow and leave it alone method. This year so far my two blackcurrant bushes have yielded 21lb 6oz, there is over 10lb left to pick. I’m wondering how close to 35lb from two bushes i can get. The experts will tell you something else. Me, i’ll back my own judgement all day long.