Ripening blackcurrants

Harvesting and preserving your fruit & veg

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Primrose
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Picked some blackcurrants yesterday evening. A few could have dne with a few more hours sunshine to ripen them a little more but birds already attempting to get at them despite netting so didn't want to risk losing them. So I decided to lay them out on a plastic tray on floor by open patio door in sunshine this morning for a few extra hours of sun before freezing them

Just went past and caught a strong whiff of blackcurrant fragrance. To my surprise they had actually started to cook in the sun's heat and had already become slightly soft.

So, interesting question. Why does a similar thing not happen when they are left on the bush to ripen? And how can I best finish ripening off black and red currants if I have to pick them slightly earlier than I would like? Often clusters of fruit have varying degrees of ripeness.
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Cider Boys
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Hello Primrose

I also picked in most of my blackcurrants yesterday (one of my favourite fruits) and they also would have benefitted from more time to fully ripen but I just stewed mine and added sugar, tasted lovely. I am no expert cook but I would not think that you would need the berries to be fully ripe to freeze them and regarding yours going soft in the sun when they are no longer on the bush, I suppose those on the bush are still alive receiving water etc. from the plant as well as being shaded by leaves and exposed to outside breezes.

Best wishes

Barney
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The Mouse
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Mine actually seem to have cooked on the bush - I noticed yesterday morning that a lot of still-red ones had fallen off the bush, and when I accidentally knocked a branch, loads more fell off. When I felt them, they had gone soft. As I had kept them well watered in the warm, dry weather, all I can think is that Wednesday's extreme heat was too much for them! :?

Fortunately I have three other bushes elsewhere, and they are nowhere near ripe yet, so hopefully they will still go on to ripen as normal. I've got my fingers crossed, anyway.
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Primrose
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I have a couple of redcurrant bushes that are absolutely laden with fruit but those berries sre still not quite. ripe enough to pick yet. I never know what what to do with them immediately.. They usually get cleaned up and stored in freezer for use over the winter.

Today we decided we needed to reduce our freezer backlog with this season's crop coming on board so used up various bags of blackcurrants and redcurrants to make a concentrated fruit syrup which will be frozen and stored in one pint plastic milk bottles to use with winter porridge, desserts and for hot fruit drinks with a slice of lemon. It,s amazing how doing this this can reduce your bulk freezer storage problems!
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Our are still dark green no sign of them ripening but they are getting nice and big
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