A very hairy gooseberry

All over the North Pennines there are traces of small settlements - usually mining communities or sometimes farmsteads - that have long since fallen into ruin. In some cases all you can see is a few piles of stones and the rectangular outline of building foundations, but often you can also find botanical traces of past gardens.

The commonest edible plants in these are rhubarb and gooseberries, which persist for generations, long after the gardeners who originally planted them have been forgotten. At this time of year the gooseberries start to ripen and I always make a point of tasting these, which mare mots likely to be forgotten varieties that are no longer cultivated. There are also scattered bushes well away from gardens, that would have been bird-sown. There is a large gene pool of feral gooseberry varieties out there in the countryside and maybe there might even be some that are resistant to diseases like gooseberry mildew.

This unusually hairy example was growing through an old wall in Teesdale and ripens to a deep ruby red. Its fruits are exceptionally sweet, though you need to rub off those hairs first it you want to eat it uncooked. It probably closely resembles the wild species that originated in continental Europe and which lost most of its bristles during cultivation.  If it was stewed or used to make chutney (gooseberries make excellent chutney) then they wouldn't matter too much.

I've rooted a cutting of this one, that's now growing in my garden. 

Apparently, gooseberries were first domesticated in the Middle Ages and there are records of plants being imported from France in 1275 for planting in Edward 's garden in the Tower of London.

Growing goooseberries competitively, to see who could produce the largest fruits, became popular amongst Lancashire weavers in the 1740s and the heaviest fruits weighed in at over 50 grams, over seven times the weight of the wild ones. By the early 1900s almost 1000 named varieties existed, cultivated by gooseberry clubs.

There is still an annual gooseberry growing championship at Egton Bridge near Whitby in North Yorkshire, which you can read about by clicking here. This year's show is on 1st. August.

The world record currently stands at 62 grams. 

Gooseberry sawfly

A few weeks ago, when I photographed these little hymenopterans - each about five millimetres long - I knew the pattern of events that was about to unfold in our garden.

These are gooseberry sawflies that were busy mating and looking for somewhere to lay their eggs.

 They're attractive little insects, but when they hatch their larvae....

  

... have a phenomenal ability to defoliate gooseberry bushes. These six bare leaf stalks were fine healthy leaves the day before this photo was taken...... 

 ....before the gooseberry sawfly larvae got to work.

Last year I posted on the Solomon's seal sawflies that breed in the garden and lay their eggs on their host plant in early May. They're back this year and here are their larvae at work. They are highly organised defoliators, perhaps sticking together for mutual safety. When they are tiny they just strip layers of tissue from the understide of leaves and so pass unnoticed, but when they get to this size you can almost see the leaves disappear as you watch.

 This is insect teamwork in action.

I could, I suppose, follow the advice in gardening books and take drastic measures to wipe them out but the Solomon's seal sawfly population has been established in the garden for about a decade or so and the larvae only make serious inroads into the plants long after they have finished flowering. They haven't prevented the Solomon's seal from thriving and spreading a little further every year. As for the gooseberry sawfly, well that only gets into its stride once the fruits are well on the way to ripening - and there are only so many gooseberries that it's wise for a human to eat anyway. And as the old saying goes, 'it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good' - the sawfly larvae provide a food source for many of the garden birds.