Focus on... Currant care

Traditional black fruits, vibrant reds or striking pinks and whites – whatever you prefer, it’s easy to grow your own juicy currants

- Lucy Chamberlain

IT’S the ultimate no-brainer: pay £3 per punnet for currants, or buy a bush for less than a tenner 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 big bud mite resistance 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 a really diverse genus!

Grow better fruits 

Growing methods for each do have similarities (see my pointers on page 20). White and pink currants are a sport of redcurrant (R. rubrum) so can be treated the same, whereas blackcurrant is another species (