Focus on…Currant care
IT’S the ultimate no-brainer: pay £3 per punnet for currants, or buy a bush for less than £10 to give you 20 punnets per year for 15 years? Let’s think about that for a millisecond…
Why anyone buys currants by the punnet is beyond me. Established bushes yield roughly 4kg (9lb) of fruit per year, plus the plants are self-fertile, easy to maintain and trouble-free. Modern breeding gives us resistance to big bud mite in blackcurrants, such as ‘Foxendown’, extra-long strigs in redcurrants like ‘Redpoll’, and many attributes in between – mildew resistance and frost-resistant flowers being two more to look for. Let’s not forget that you can buy white currants and pink currants, too. Ribes is certainly a diverse genus!
“Growing them is the ultimate no-brainer”
Growing essentials
Growing methods) so can be treated the same, whereas blackcurrant is another species () so has differences linked to cropping, pruning and consequent nutrition.
