Help us stop the Gooseberry thieves!
Finbow, I was about to send you the question - "How does one know when their gooseberries are ripe for picking" and then they were gone.
It appears the Sustained allotment has been victim to some hungry birds and 90% of the crop has gone - I am assuming it's birds, rather than nasty human beings
Anyway to avoid the same thing happening again, how do I know when gooseberries are ripe and what could I do to stop the birds getting them. Is netting my only answer?
You can see my blog entry about the matter by clicking here
Marc
Hi Marc, Sounds like primates or pigeons. I have been grazing our's, a few a day, for a week now and they are nearly over. I am at present writing an OU paper on bird predation and one of my working hypotheses is that birds don't attack (green) gooseberries and greengages because of crypsis, they are the same colour as the background compared with red or black fruit. I have certainly not suffered from any predation on the gooz-gogs but a garden context is different from an allotment. Pigeons are capable of about every form of attrocity possible (down to deliberately upturning freshly-planted onion sets) and they could be the culprits. If they disappeared overnight, without leaving tell-tale traces on the ground it would be more likely to be primates. Anyway, I eat them raw and like them sweet but if you are using them for chutney, they should be a bit tart, so pick them earlier next year.
