Harvesting all colour of currants.

Harvesting black currants by cutting back the branch and removing the currants at leisure.  Is this method also suitable for red and white currants,  i.e. pruning the bush at the time of harvesting?

Cheers and thanks in advance.   Tony.

Black currants fruit on wood one year old and older, so you get a few years of fruiting off each branch. Cutting them early seems wrong to me. I just strip them by pull my hand down the stalks at the centre of the bunches.

The correct method of harvesting Blackcurrant is to pick the ripe ones individually or a whole strig if they are all ripe as you would if you were picking for a show. You should only remove the branch if it is due to be removed as part of your winter prune or if the branch is too low to the ground. I would rarely remove a branch like this as the chances are there are more unripe currants than ripe ready for picking so you are thereby wasting a good proportion of your crop. The best fruit comes from wood produced in the previous summer so you need a number of branches for the shoots to grow, cutting them off just to harvest this years currants will reduce next years crop.
Do not cut branches on red and white currants as fruits form at the base of one year shoots and on spurs on older branches so you need a permanent structure from which you get your next crop. This is completely different from Blackcurrant where you need a succession of new wood and is why you prune out a good proportion of old wood from autumn onward.