Property News · February 4, 2017

Alys Fowler: give straggly soft fruit bushes a new lease of life


Want to turn awkward-looking things into something elegant and useful? Make them into standardsPerhaps 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. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Alys Fowler: give straggly soft fruit bushes a new lease of life

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