My two green gooseberry bushes are laden with full size gooseberries.
They are also carefully netted so that the birds - otherwise most
welcome in the garden - don't get any.
However, I have tried a couple of the more golden looking ones, and I
find them still extremely tart, and not the texture I would expect -
hence not ripe yet.
When can I expect to harvest gooseberries, and am I naive to expect
they might get *just a little* sweeter???

While I'm on the gooseberry subject. I had last year my first
infestation of the caterpillars of the gooseberry fly - can't remember
its precise name, but the grubs are about 2cm long, green with black
head and legs. At the time, I got rid of it by spraying an organic
insecticide - which did the trick. This year, by the time I spotted
them, they had got onto the redcurrant bush. Out of insecticide, I
used the hose to spray the branches with water at relatively high
pressure (though not that high that it would damage the leaves) - which
knocked most of the caterpillars off, and apparently stopped - or at
least slowed down - the systematic stripping by the little beggars.
Any idea whether this is effective long term, or can I expect them to
survive the (relatively) high pressure shower and come back for more?
Cat(h)