The reason I've not posted about our allotment in a while was normally we'd go on the weekend but one week my partner was very sick, then I was away and he was still not very well, then my son and I fell very sick, then after we were nearly fully back to health we had a huge down pour of rain on the weekend making it just near impossible for us to go. This weekend we had the Olympic Torch coming through our town so I invited a friend with her 15 month old daughter to come round and to see the torch here as well as enjoy some snacks and play time. This left us with yesterday (Sunday) and we were amazed how much had changed! The raspberries had come back to life at the bottom of the plot, the other raspberries were growing this season's fruit, the gooseberries were starting to drop, the currant bush was now confirmed to be a blackcurrant bush and our spring onions were growing very quickly! Sadly our runner beans had been nibbled on and one of our tomato plants was screaming for water, even though we had loads of rain over the last two weeks.
Anyway I'm writing about the blackcurrants. Now I love blackcurrant juice and my son does too and he also loves jam so with the amount of currants coming off this single blackcurrant bush I've decided to make jam and squash. Because we were totally not ready to be picking I only had a bag with me so tried to pick as many blackcurrants as I could. The moment I pulled up a branch to look for any fruit I'd not find five of six currants... I'd find the whole damn branch was filled with them! Most of them were still not fully black but still made me think "how on earth are we going to pick all of these?" so I googled around. Sadly there doesn't seem to be much I could find that was useful, however the idea of cutting some of the branches off with currants ready to be harvested sounded the best option as it would allow the currants that were further inside the bush to grow and also mean I am pruning the bush which is starting to grow a little out of control for our liking.
I also learnt that gooseberry bushes have nasty spikes. I didn't realise this until I tried to sit down by our blackcurrant bush to put some of the fruit at the bottom. Yes I got stung near my bottom... ouch.
I'm hoping to go back up during the week. I need to palm our son off to someone for a few hours because there's too much to be done and I can't watch him and use sharp things. Not a good mix. Oh well, wish us some luck, please!
