Kitchen Garden Forum

Can anyone tell me what has happened?My o/h joe has a plot next to mine,hes had the plot for about 4 yrs now and inherited a line of gooseberry bushes that cross the width of his plot,the bushes have been there for years.
This year we noticed that all the bushes looked dead,but now some of them have green shoots with fruit on them,but it is only 1 or 2 branches on a whole bush and the rest of the bush looks dead,can you help and what should we do?

Not sure my own experience will help but two years ago one of my gooseberry bushes apparently died on me when the gooseberries were half-way through their formation. The berries all shrivelled and the leaves died so I decided to wait until autumn and then dig it up. When I started excavating to do this I found a huge colony of ants had made their home all around the roots. I dug out as many as I could, put ant powder around them and hard pruned the bush back, even though by then it looked pretty dead. The following spring it started to sprout again and bore a few fruits. This spring it fully recovered and is now laden with gooseberries. I can't think that ants could cause a whole row of gooseberries to die though but it may be worth excavating around the roots of one of the bushes to see if anything untoward is happening below ground level. Hard pruning back now might help, especially if we're going to have a hot summer and the bushes will be under stress, but possibly some more experienced soft fruit growers will have a better solution. Could the bushes have been exposed to a spray of some kind from a nearby plot?

Could you give some extra information - did the bushes leaf out and then drop their leaves or did they just never leaf out in the first place?