[N.WalesIdealist]

My two blackcurrant bushes that I moved over the winter have fruited and are ripening up already.  I picked one last week and it was delicious!

Have they been tricked by the warm April we had?  Or is it the move that's prompted them into growth?  Has anyone else found their blackcurrants to be early???

[Ropster]

mine are all ripe, but I thought that was normal, I cant remember the normal time for them to ripen

[lucywil]

mine were just about ripe, then somebody pinched them, the whole lot, 5 bushes full  we have a fruit thief on our plots, everyones gooseberries have gone too

[Swing Swang]

@ lucy - sure it wasn't birds? - lost all my blackcurrents and gooseberries to birds in 36 hours last year

[sarajane]

Mine both disappeared last week.  Pigeons had them virtually overnight and silly me didn't cover them with fleece as they weren't quite ripe, or so I thought.

Are you sure Lucywil the birds have not got at them  -  they seem prticularly greedy this year

[bigben]

My first year with blackberries and as others have said - birds scoffed the lot. They really know when they are ripe. There are one or two that look ripe but are not - as soon as they are the go! Nets next year!

[JayG]

Don't grow them myself but I do remember picking them on a farm in Kent when I was a student, and they were about the first crop of my fruit-picking season, which I guess makes it July rather than June. (They were also by far the hardest work; boy those boxes took some filling with the small, low-growing little swines!) 

[lucywil]

@ lucy - sure it wasn't birds? - lost all my blackcurrents and gooseberries to birds in 36 hours last year

yeah birds was our first thought but most of the plots that had the gooseberries taken had large shoe prints left behind

[jimthejimjim]

Mine are ready to be picked.

I find it takes ages to pick them all 

[Dominic]

mine are pretty much done