Friday 24 February 2012

Currants & Berries

When I had the allotment, I had a redcurrant bush and picked loads of redcurrants. Plans were for raspberry and redcurrant jam and redcurrant jelly, butI just didn't get round to doing anything with them. They're still in the freezer waiting for me to use them.

At some point over the last couple of months, there was a TV program on with chefs talking about "saving" great British foods. One episode included the whitecurrant. I'd never heard of whitecurrants before.

So I looked on a couple seed websites and found that T&M had an offer on a triple pack of currants including redcurrant, whitecurrant and blackcurrant. I grabbed my credit card and about 2 weeks later they arrived!

The missus found a blueberry bush in the pound shop so we've got that too.

I remember getting blueberry bushes a few years ago, but didn't get round to preparing the ground for them. I think I put them into pots, but think they'd been in the packet too long and had dried out and died.

This time round I'm not taking chances. The bed I'm planting them all in needs a fair bit of work to prepare it and I've got a zillion other jobs to do, so for the time being, I've planted them into large pots. I gave them a good soaking in a bucket of water for a couple of hours beforehand.

The redcurrant bush I had on the allotment was about 3ft high, 3ft wide. Hopefully these bushes will do the same. My gooseberries on the allotment were like that too, but my gooseberries at home are nowhere near that big, even though they are several years old. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the pruning, so not sure if I should prune them or just let them grow wild. Research needed!

No comments:

Post a Comment