You either love them or you hate them, but one thing’s for sure they are prickly to pick! I have have just been tussling with my five standard gooseberries which were so laden with fruit the branches were almost vertical. One standard yielded 20lb of fruit alone and most goes into the freezer for winter puddings, eaten with blackcurrants, reducrrants, apple and raspberries. This year’s crop was the heaviest ever and I have three varieties. One is ‘Invicta’, a vigorous grower with bright-green shiny foliage capable of shrugging off American gooseberry mildew — the main disease of gooseberries. This cooking variety produces green fruit in July.

I also grow two varieties that have now been superceded. ‘Rokula’ is a German-raised red-fruited variety, but it’s a light cropper for me. Generally most good fruit nurseries now sell the almost thornless, red-fruited ‘Pax’ (bred by East Malling in 1999) or ‘Hinnomaki Red’ (a Finnish red) instead. East Malling also produced the green-fruited ‘Greenfinch’ in 1984. All are American mildew resistant. My third variety is ‘Whinham’s Industry’, a red 1835 variety that gets picked here when green. If I leave it to redden the blackbirds get them first. This old variety does suffer from mildew in dry areas, but it isn’t a problem in my windy garden. Most modern varieties have ‘Whinham’s Industry’ in their breeding line. Straight after picking I summer prune my bushes by reducing the side shoots back to five leaves. This is particularly important with standards, which can snap at the graft if the weight of overhead branches becomes too heavy. Winter pruning, done when the branches are bare, consists of tipping back the leading branches and thinning them out to create an open airy bush. Creating good airflow reduces the chance of diseases such as mildew and helps to ripen the fruit. This technique is also used on redcurrants, but not blackcurrants. The latter fruit on new wood so the technique is to remove some of the old branches from the base. Many gardeners do this as they pick the fruit. With gooseberries and redcurrants, when winter pruning, start by remove the three ‘d’s — the dead, dying or diseased wood. Open up the middle of the bush to create a goblet shape whilst trying to preserve the strongest growth. Remove any low branches that lag on the ground, if it’s a bush. Remove any crossing branches: if they rub together they might allow diseases to enter. Then shorten any remaining leaders by a half. Aim to get a mix of new wood and older wood. Gooseberries seem to like my cold garden and my standards nestle among perennial plants quite happily and still crop well. I do get some sawfly problems, but chaffinches generally collect the caterpillars for me. Standard gooseberries seem less prone to these caterpillars: perhaps the adults have further to crawl from the soil where they pupate over winter. You can thin the fruit in May to produce large fruit, although I never manage to do this in my own garden. May is hectic enough.

Gooseberries were widely grown northern England during the 18th century and 120 gooseberry shows were held. The heaviest gooseberry won either a copper kettle, a pair of sugar tongs, a cream jug, or a corner cupboard and, of course, bags of kudos. One champion yellow gooseberry named The Teaser weighed over 32 penny weights at a show in 1830. The red ‘Roaring Lion’ was almost as heavy. These giants were produced by leaving only two or three fruits on each bush. Each fruit was partly submerged in a cup of water in a process called ‘suckling the gooseberry’, (this information from Christopher Stock’s excellent book Forgotten Fruits.) There are still eight gooseberry shows held in Cheshire today.