This has been the best year ever for my soft fruit and especially the gooseberries.
This is a 4 year old plant of the variety
'Invicta' and you can see that the fruit is much too close together to grow a decent sized berry. I have thinned out the fruit today so that there was a good sized berry about every 2" on the branch. This will result in large, sweet, delicious gooseberries in about a month.
Even though these thinnings are small and very acid, they are perfect for cooking and still have the most wonderful flavour. It seems to me that the acid in a fruit is what gives it a great flavour.
Just a bit of a fiddly job 'top and tailing' them. With a pair of scissors you snip off the stalk and the flower end.
So this afternoon at tea time, I enjoyed a bowl full of gooseberry crumble with cream! Ahhhhhh!
This is a 4 year old plant of the variety 'Invicta' and you can see that the fruit is much too close together to grow a decent sized berry. I have thinned out the fruit today so that there was a good sized berry about every 2" on the branch. This will result in large, sweet, delicious gooseberries in about a month.
Even though these thinnings are small and very acid, they are perfect for cooking and still have the most wonderful flavour. It seems to me that the acid in a fruit is what gives it a great flavour.
Just a bit of a fiddly job 'top and tailing' them. With a pair of scissors you snip off the stalk and the flower end.
So this afternoon at tea time, I enjoyed a bowl full of gooseberry crumble with cream! Ahhhhhh!