Essential Soft Fruits
Gooseberries seem seriously underrated these days. Yet gooseberries make excellent pies, jams and wine. They freeze well and brought out in the New Year stewed with sugar and served with yoghurt are especially welcome. I made splendid gooseberry and elder flower jam in the summer of 2007 and this year with fruit little more than thinings. Wine made from gooseberries and elder flowers is second to none in my opinion. I defy anyone to tell the difference between that and a white grape wine, and if you can manage secondary fermentation the result is equivalent to champagne.
Invicta is a good all round culinary gooseberry - a heavy cropper that is resistant to mildew, but you must not leave it too long on the bush as it acquires a smokey flavour. Like all soft fruit it responds well to watering and mulching. I grow mine as oblique cordons. A more space saving method is fan training against boundary walls and fences or on wires and posts.
Everyone knows about red currant jelly, which is indispensable in my view with lamb, but red currants will also make a superb wine that can stand comparison with a rosé. I grow Red Lake, Stanza, Redstart and Red Poll, which all have good flavour and crop well. The season begins at the end of June with Red Lake, although there are earlier varieties. This is followed by Stanza, Red Start and lastly Red Poll in August. Red Poll is spectacular with strigs as long as five inches carrying large berries; a single strig can weigh up to four ounces. It looks particularly striking grown as an oblique cordon or fan. This was bred, like Invicta gooseberry, at East Malling Research Station, and extends the season to September in an average year.
Among black currants, the Ben series raised at the Scottish Crop Research Institute have now taken over from traditional varieties. One of the most vigorous of these is Ben Lomond, which can grow to around ten feet across and has a superabundance of fruit; it seems a pity to prune it! I am training a large fruited variety, Ben Connan, as a fan and this should be stunning in a few years. Ben Sarek is a compact variety, but it will ‘flop’ with a heavy crop under heavy rain. Although black currants are well out of fashion, black currant jam, cheese cake, cordial and of course cassis are difficult to beat.
Blue berries have always given me problems over the years. The first was the difficulty in finding a suitable planting medium. They need acid soil and I grow them in large holes in the ground filled with the required medium, but after including far too much soil in the formula, the first plants stubbornly refused to grow. Successful formula number 2 was and still is a ratio of equal amounts of top soil, peat and sharp sand. My second problem was trying to find a good variety, that is, until I sampled Herbert at the Dorset Blueberry Farm. This was superb, not bland and mealy like my earlier varieties, although I have yet to obtain plants that are the true variety. Last year I acquired Brigitta, which produced a small amount of sharp, exquisite berries. After many years of searching, I may have found a winner and this year ordered six more plants. For anyone not familiar with blueberries, they appear to be free from pests and diseases, other than birds, and store well keeping in the bottom of the fridge for weeks.
On my heavy clay soil Autumn Bliss raspberry thrives where other varieties fail. The canes can reach six to seven feet high and produce fruit almost as large as a loganberry. This is a primo-cane raspberry - fruits on canes made in the same year - and bred some years ago at East Malling. Planted in February, they fruit in August to October with a few in July as a pre-tasting. These tall canes need regular watering during the growing season to give quality fruit. If you are short of space try planting them in containers or grow some in the greenhouse. Many people now regard Autumn Bliss as history, superseded by more modern varieties but for gardeners it remains first class.
Pegasus is a strawberry variety that proved a success even in the monsoon-like conditions of 2007. In February 2006, I planted a raised bed with bare rooted strawberries, including Pegasus, again bred by East Malling. They were covered with fleece and cropped in June, but this is not something that I would recommend, yet nothing ventured nothing learnt! In 2007 the fleece was off. I had a large crop, with some individual fruits very large indeed, but as everyone knows we had the wettest day for 60 years and two months of continuous rain. The village was flooded four times; sandbags were a permanent feature. But the loss from botrytis on my strawberries was minimal, the greatest problem was slugs, some several inches long with the black keel slug causing the most damage.
In the past a wet spell during the strawberry season has made the crop almost a total loss, but not with Pegasus. My diary entry for 12 July reads 'Torrential downpour late afternoon, picked last of the Pegasus strawberries; the first ripened the end of May. Excellent cropper and resistant to botrytis, all they have experienced is rain, rain, rain!' That says it all - Pegasus is a 'Must have', although it does show a downside in that the core can be slightly hard, but I can live with that.
Blackberry wine is probably the richest in flavour of any garden fruit and of course blackberries are excellent eaten fresh when really ripe and good for pies and jams. However, they have never been a conspicuous success in my ground, yet a neighbour has a fantastic bush of Fantasia. Even so, a few years ago I was given a blackberry called Waldo which is certainly not vigorous compared with most blackberries. Waldo is a thornless variety in contrast to Fantasia that has evil thorns and a real garden thug. In an average summer Waldo is a superb cropper with large, long fruits. During 2007 the endless rain was responsible for poor pollination and almost no crop at all. Sadly this year’s rain has killed it off, so although a high quality fruit it cannot survive Nottinghamshire’s clay and downpours!
Loganberries and Tayberries are another indispensable fruit - freezing well and in the past I have also made them into jam and wine, which is second only to blackberry in richness. Some pundits say that Loganberries have more flavour than Tayberries, but I grow them both; they crop at the same time, so they can get mixed up. In my experience Tayberry is the better cropper.
Adrian Baggaley
Photographs of Invicta gooseberry and Pegasus strawberry kindly supplied and reproduced with permisson from East Malling Research; photograph of Tayberry supplied by Derek Jennings; remainder supplied by Adrian Baggaley.
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