Pink currants - beautiful coral-coloured berries

I found these plants looking rather sad and forgotten at the back of an end of season sale bay in a Crews Hill garden centre. Alongside leftover hebes and apple standards with crooked stems were three bare-stemmed plants with 'Pink Currants RosaSport' on the label, £3.00 each.

I wasn't sure how serendipitous a find this was. We have a blackcurrant glut every year and two new redcurrant bushes thanks to cuttings a fellow allotmenteer gave me. But I was planning a soft fruit area on the new allotment and so far only had the redcurrants and some rather feral raspberry canes to go in there. The picture on the label was pretty, showing plants abundant with coral-coloured sprays of fruit, and clearly no-one else was going to buy them.

Pink currants are a redcurrant variant, ripening to a flushed salmon-pink in early July. They can be grown just as black- or redcurrants: best in free-draining soils and in a position where they can get a little afternoon shade. Having said that, my blackcurrants are established in the wettest part of my allotment and they don't seem to mind. I built some free-standing brick raised beds for the pink currants to help with the drainage. I also made sure to weed the raised beds properly: the blackcurrants do get a bit overrun each year by bindweed, however diligently I try to dig it out around the roots.

The pink currants came in containers so I removed them, watered well and teased out the roots, before planting them in a hole slightly bigger than the pot. I back-filled with compost, adding another layer as mulch once the plants were in situ and firmed the top. Having watered them in well, I left them alone to settle in.

They fruited just four months later (they must have been in those pots for a while ...). Not a huge crop, but enough to promise much more in succeeding year. The fruit look like little pink pearls, with a fresh, almost floral flavour. Certainly not as strong as blackcurrants or as sweet/sharp as redcurrants. Currants are easy and rewarding to turn into jelly, but until I get an overwhelming glut of these I'll be content to stick with eating them fresh from the plant. Those that did make it home were scattered over fruit salads, used to top breakfast cereal and porridge, and, most successfully, folded into an Eton Mess with a few raspberries, happily also ripe at the same time - see below.

Pink currant mess with raspberries.

The perils of the big bad bud

I inherited a couple of blackcurrant bushes when I took on my allotment. They were there already, flourishing and providing heavy crops of fruit each year without fuss. This means I never went through the process of researching varieties, which types might give the best fruits, or be the most pest-resistant. I just left them well alone and enjoyed the resulting blackcurrants, fresh from the bush, made into sorbet, and best of all, turned into crème de cassis (above).

This state of blissful ignorance also meant that I didn't spot that my bushes were falling prey to a mite known as 'big bud' (or Cecidophyopsis ribis, to give it its proper name). Or rather, I did spot it, but happily imagined that the swollen buds were just getting ready to burst forth with new leaves, rather than harbouring a wee pest. 

Inside each of the enlarged buds is a colony of big bud mites, microscopic creatures which feed on the sap in the developing leaves. Big bud does what it says on the tin: the winter buds are round and bigger than the unaffected ones, which are tight and oval. To the uninitiated (OK, maybe just me), the affected buds can actually look healthier. 

The big bud mite won't kill off your blackcurrant bushes, but the swollen buds won't open and so will stunt the growth of the plant. Big bud mites are also responsible for spreading reversion virus in blackcurrants which will severely reduce the amount of fruit the bush produces. The mites can also inhabit red and whitecurrants and gooseberries, though without causing the characteristic 'big bud' for which they're named.

Once it has taken hold, big bud can be difficult to eradicate. In summer, they will emerge infest new buds. They can be blown on to your bushes by the wind, but they are only really noticeable in the winter when you can clearly see the enlarged buds. There aren't any chemical sprays available to the domestic gardener which will be effective, and anyway, this seems like an overreaction; it's not as if the plants are in imminent danger of collapse. In the longer term you may have to replant your blackcurrants if/when they develop full-blown reversion virus.

In the meantime, it's not too onerous to check the plants a few times over the winter, removing the big buds by hand, and can be done at the same time as pruning. Just don't drop the big buds and lose them in the undergrowth. One is advised to burn rather than composting as well, to ensure that you don't end up breeding more bug bud mite colonies.

Further reading
RHS pest and disease pages: https://www.rhs.org.uk/Advice/Profile?PID=452
Big bud and reversion  disease in Which? magazine: http://www.which.co.uk/documents/pdf/blackcurrant-reversion-151472.pdf