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Black gooseberries
addict
Posts: 659
Where I was working yesterday the lady grows gooseberries and they were all black/brown! Not like sooty mould but tough leathery skins. Not come across this before. Any ideas what this is?
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Overripe whinhams industry go like that. They start a deep red when ripe, but lack of water will give them leathery skins. They shrivel and go like raisins.
Thanks fidget
Very possibly the case. They are not the best of waterers!
I have a 2 yr old gooseberry bush that has grown out of a small gap between a concrete path and a stone outhouse wall, opposite and two metres away from a well established ordinary (green fruit) gooseberry bush. (There are lots of backcurrant bushes nearby, too.) The first year, there were just two or three green fruits; this year, there is a bumber crop, but they have all turned reddish-black in colour. There is no sign of insect disturbance or unhealthy stems or leaves, and, cut open, the fruits seem healthy and uninfested. They even taste okay, if a little more tart than regular gooseberries. Are they a safe mutation, or are they diseased? (I'd upload pictures if I knew how!!)
They look more like blackcurrants JR.
I wonder if you've got your own hybrid.
They do cross, Jostaberries are hybrids between the 2
In the sticks near Peterborough
Worcesterberries are a cross between blackcurrant s and gooseberries.
are jostaberries a cross between something else fidget, or another cross with these 2?
In the sticks near Peterborough
Worcesterberries , I remember being told as a child, were a gooseberry and blackcurrant cross, my mum had a plant from Woolworths. I think they are now thought to be a selection of Ribes divaricum or something like that, and jostaberries some complicated cross between all three. I think the pictured plant is probably some sort of cross. Very gooseberry type leaves but blackcurrant like fruit.
I agree with pansyface on that one.