Mike Lyle wrote:
Cat(h) wrote:
[...]
When can I expect to harvest gooseberries, and am I naive to expect
they might get *just a little* sweeter???
[...]

It sounds as though you want them for dessert purposes, but of course
they don't need to be perfectly ripe for cooking. And if you want to
make wine, then IMO unripe ones give a much _better_ flavour than ripe.
If I had to choose only one fruit to grow in Britain for white wine, it
would be gooseberries without hesitation: a modest addition of grape
for quality, of course, but for most of us it's more convenient to pay
a foreigner to do the grape-growing.


I trust the foreigner and the grape *exclusively* when it comes to
wine. I have had to suffer wayyy too many samplings of Aunty Nora's
vile paint stripper home made from flowering scutch grass in this part
of the world...
I would like to be able to eat the gooseberries raw, with maybe a
little added sugar and cream, but at the very least to make fools or
gooseberry compote. I don't expect them to be as sweet as
strawberries, but right now they seem still too sour even for my
purposes.

Cat(h)