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 (R. nigrum) so has differences linked to cropping, pruning and consequent nutrition. Reds and relatives crop on older wood so can be trained into cordons, fans and even espaliers with lots of fruit buds. Consequently, the most important nutrient to supply them with is potash. Blackcurrants fruit predominantly on one-year-old stems so are pruned heavily each year to encourage young wood, which requires ample nitrogen.

Lucy’s corner 
Six steps to cultivating juicy currants