Currant Potential

Day 224: My red currants are putting on their first crop of fruit this year, and although I probably won't have enough for even a small batch of jam, I should have enough to combine as a tangy addition with another type of fruit for the base (raspberries, maybe?). The variety is Red Lake, and I have reason to believe that my stock was cultivated in California because they brought with them a notorious pest of California vineyards, Blue-Green Sharpshooters. So much for interstate quarantine of plants! In any event, I am winning the Sharpshooter War by diligent application of a pesticide. It was not my first choice of defense, but I soon discovered that for soapy water to be effective, I'd have to sit in the garden to apply it every half hour, and even then, it would just relocate the Sharpshooters to other plants. So, that said, I broke out some heavier artillery and set to work eliminating Sharpshooters from my garden. Now a note on currant cultivation: most cultivated currants fruit on second-year canes. As you can see behind the fruits in this picture, the second-year cane develops a woody bark, making it fairly easy to identify when it comes time to prune them out. Although the older canes may still bear fruit for a couple of years, amounts will be reduced. At most, canes should be kept no more than three years, one as a non-fruiting stem and two to bear. Then they should be cut out to establish a rotation between new canes and old in which both bearing canes and non-bearing canes exist side-by-side. I'll be marking mine with different colours of flagging tape so I can easily tell which is which.