Gooseberries - 13 July 2024

I found this lovely gooseberry plant in amongst some weeds :

_{These gooseberries remind me of red grapes !}

The berries looked very ripe and so attractive; I reckoned that they were ready to be picked :

Trying to pick gooseberries is not easy at all. You have to contend with huge sharp thorns all over the branches.

I hope you can see the thorns in the photos. They’re not so visible, but you can certainly feel them as you try to pick the berries. It was worth it though.

Don’t they just look delicious? I did try a few; the skin is a bit ‘thick’ in my opinion but they’re not bad at all.

I followed this gooseberry foraging with some Google searches at home and found the name of this variety, Captivator, Ribes Uva Crispa .

I found here that the plant can be cultivated either in the ground or in containers. When I found the bush above it was in the ground and the area was a quite overgrown so I can imagine that planting it in a container would be easier to manage the area around it. One issue is watering though. Keeping plants well watered in containers is hard in the summer (except in the UK I should say as this summer it’s been so rainy). The plant can also apparently be used along fences and I can imagine that would be useful with all the thorns making it almost impenetrable !

The most important issue for me is that I collected about 300g and I’m now trying to find a recipe to make something nice that’s not so full of sugar to enjoy.

This simple recipe is based on an original recipe printed in a paper many years ago for cherry clafoutis. I’ve tried this sort of recipe before but it’s not worked so well so this time seem to have the best ingredients.

I’ll try and come back to tell you how I get on.

Thank you for reading !