Being very easy to grow and one of the very earliest of the fruits of the year, growing your own can be fun and rewarding.

The gooseberry comes in so many different varieties of plant and fruit from the large red gooseberries you often see in desserts to the small yellow sugary variety and some are more resistant than others to mildew. If you grow a few different varieties you may be able to prolong the picking seasons for your gooseberries.

Now is the ideal time for planting gooseberries, autumn months are always best. After you have dug over the sunny sheltered, spot in your garden, dig over the soil for a planning hole. Use rotted manure at the base of the hole along with general purchase fertaliser.

The bushes should be planted as bare roots and their roots should be spread out within the soil hole before covering with freshly fertalised soil.

Pruning
Pruning through the winter months is essential for gooseberries as they grow with many branches and can get quite out of hand so cutting the branches back regularly will help to balance the growth of branches to keep the centre of the bush as open as possible to make the fruit helps to form a balanced branch structure and keeps the centre of the bush open to make picking easier. Pruning encourages air to circulate around the plant which stops mildew and as the fruits will form from the old wood around the previous year’s growth so cutting back to 2 buds help them to grow. Shoots in the bush centre should be pruned away and leaders need to be cut away by a third.