Perhaps it is because they are tart, or because gooseberry fool and redcurrant vinegar aren’t half as popular as they should be, but redcurrants and gooseberries are the most neglected of the soft fruit bushes. Sometimes this matters little and they flourish. Often, though, it means they turn into straggly, unattractive and unloved plants. If you own such a bush, now is the time to liberate it: to make that awkward-looking thing into something more elegant and useful, turn it into a standard.
OK, I may be overegging things to say that standards are elegant, but they are space-saving. A standard is a shrub or tree with a substantial section of clear stem; in soft fruit terms, that means one metre, although for trees it’s 1.5m or more; a half-standard is just that. The great bonus with a standard is you can plant herbs, strawberries, lettuce and the like around the base. They can work well in a pot, too. There are drawbacks, though. Soft fruit standards need staking as they are top heavy, and in windy areas this makes them a silly idea. Standards also produce less fruit, but anyone with three years’ worth of redcurrants in the freezer will know this is not necessarily a bad thing.
There are two routes to turning a straggly redcurrant or gooseberry into a standard: there is the proper method, where you take cuttings and start from scratch, or the hack. The hack is simple. Take your old straggly bush and find a stem that is straightish and relatively central. Remove all the other stems, but don’t prune anything on the selected stem. Find a stake, and with a pair of tights or another soft tie, gently coerce the stem to a more upright position.
Staking is key to getting this right. Remove side shoots that appear on the lower third of the selected stem. Over the next couple of years, keep removing the lower third of side shoots and leave the top alone. Once there’s enough top growth to create a lollipop-shaped bush, start pruning. Fruit is produced mainly on older wood, so cut side shoots back to one to three buds from the base, and shorten branch tips by a quarter.
Before you compost the prunings, take cuttings. This way, if it all goes to pot you’ll still be able to follow the proper route. Find nice young shoots 25-30cm long, cut just below a bud. Trim the top to just above a shoot. Insert the shoot into a pot or the ground so that roughly a third is above ground. Ensure, if in a container, that the soil never dries out. Wait patiently and in spring the shoot will grow. The cuttings should be left in this space until autumn, at which point you can move it to a new location, if you wish.
If you want to have your gooseberry/currant cake and eat it, buy a pre-trained standard. Wholesale nursery Frank P Matthews does the best job. Go to the website and type in your postcode to find your nearest supplier.
