Delicious and healthy gooseberry: planting and care

Virtually every garden site you can find gooseberries. Planting and caring for him does not require special knowledge, it is enough to take into account several features. In addition, the berries of gooseberry are among the most useful. They remove salts of heavy metals from the body, normalize digestion and pressure. Today, there are several dozen varieties that are resistant to disease and differ in taste. Here are a few of them, which you can pay attention to:

- "Kolobok" is a rather old variety, but to this day it shows excellent results. Has a pleasant taste of red berries. Thorns are not very prickly and small - this is particularly pleasing in a culture such as gooseberry. Planting and caring for him are no different from other varieties. The only drawback is the tendency to thicken the bush, which is easily corrected with the help of a pruner.

- "Narodny" - is characterized by rapid growth, in two years you will be able to collect a full harvest of delicious berries of red color. In addition, its berries have an increased content of vitamin C. And on the shoots a small number of thorns.

- "Ural Emerald" is a wonderful green fruit variety. Good in all - and yield, and excellent taste of berries, and resistant to disease, and pests do not particularly like it. But there is one problem - too prickly.

- "Beryl" - has the most delicious berries of yellow-green color, with proper care, they reach 9 grams. This variety is also pleased with a small number of thorns.

Uncomplicated gooseberries: planting and care

Gooseberries are a photophilic crop, which is best planted in open solar areas. The shrub does not tolerate waterlogging (it can fake the root neck), it easily suffers temporary drought. When planting, the proximity of groundwater should be taken into account, they should not be closer than 1.5 m from the soil surface. If on your site there are high water, then you can use the method of high beds or plant a shrub on a mound. You should know that you can not put this berry in a place where raspberries or currants used to grow earlier. After these crops, the soil is severely depleted, and common pests and diseases will inevitably spread over the gooseberry. Planting and nursing should be timely so that later there will be a good harvest with large berries.

It is best to plant gooseberry in the period from mid-September to early October. In a one-year-old seedlings, the ground part consists of one shoot, a two-year-old must have 2-3 shoots. A good seedling has 3-5 skeletal roots (10-15 cm), and the fibrous roots are well developed.

The pit for planting is prepared in advance. It is excavated in a circular form 0.5 m deep and 0.5 m in diameter, while the fertile layer of the earth is discarded separately from the underlying. Take 2/3 of the fertile land, mix with a bucket of manure or compost. You also add 50 g of potassium sulfate, 180 g of superphosphate or 220 g of complex mineral fertilizer. Mix everything well and fill half the pit, pour the remaining fertile soil from above. After 1-2 weeks, this mixture in the pit settles, you can plant the plant. In this case, the root neck is buried 5-7 cm, the ground around the bush is well trampled, watered and mulched by humus. Shoots should be shortened, leaving 5-7 cm above the ground, this is necessary in order for the plant to later branch better. This is how gooseberries are planted, the care of which in future means cutting and thinning.

I would also like to note that this shrub is self-pollinating, but it is much better if there are several shrubs on the site, as the yields are higher in cross-pollination. Form the crown of this plant must be constantly. Pruning of gooseberries occurs annually, all patients are cut out, dry and weak shoots. Leave only the most powerful radical branches. The distance between them should be about 15 cm. If we consider pruning by years, it looks like this:

- In the first year, all shoots are shortened right next to the ground, only 2-3 buds are left.

- In the second year, all shoots shorter than 20 cm, as well as those that are located close to the ground, are removed. Strongly inclined branches are cut to 10-12 cm.

- For the third year the bush becomes powerful and well-formed, therefore it needs only to be weeded out.

- In the fourth and fifth year only those twigs that grow too close to the earth are removed.

- In the following years, the pruning becomes stronger, since branches will appear more than 6 years old.