Blackcurrant Galore

Sunday continued August’s theme of gradually cooling down after our hottest day of the year, on the first of the month, as Sunday’s temperature just made it into the low twenties centigrade.

We've always thought that having plenty of variety on the plot is good as different crops almost compensate for good and bad years. This year our poor soft fruit has been our summer raspberries. The plants have actually died so you can’t get much more of a crop failure. We are still hoping for a good crop of autumn raspberries.

One of our soft fruit successes this year has to be our blackcurrants which have cropped exceptionally well. We planted Ben Connan and Ben Lommond back in 2010 and this is the first year that they have cropped really heavily. It’s a time consuming job picking blackcurrants. The faster you try to pick them the more stalks you have to remove when preparing the currants for culinary use so it’s a real catch 22 situation. Anyway yesterday I managed another 1.5kg of Ben Connan and finished up with blackcurrant pickers fingers. Fortunately for me the juice washed off without staining. I might try making some blackcurrant cordial so watch this space.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett