Bob Hobden wrote:
I ate my first red currant of the year today! Ok, it wasn't /quite/ as
ripe as I first thought. But it was red! And curranty!
We always found a surefire way to tell when they were ripe, the mice took
them.

Were they extremely tall mice?
I think ours have always been chomped off by the pigeons and other wee
birdies (do jays eat berries?). We have 2 redcurrant bushes, and every
year the early one is stripped bare before I get a berry - this is the
very first one I've had in 3 years! But hten the second bush ripens and
all the birds are too fat from the first bush to eat any, and I get a
whole freezer full. But this year Nick has netted it early.