Currants, gooseberries, honeyberries, and serviceberry
The small fruits that crop when tree fruit freezes, including bloom-frost risk on honeyberries and a clear no on blueberries in alkaline soil.
When the apricot has been a bouquet for the third year running, plant a currant. Red and white currants, gooseberries, serviceberry, and golden currant are the fruits that mountain towns and high-plains yards actually harvest.
They bloom later or lower, they shrug off cold that kills peach wood, and a bush is small enough to net against birds and to cover with hail cloth. Honeyberries belong in the conversation with a warning attached. Blueberries mostly do not belong at all.
Currants and gooseberries
Red currants and white currants are the reliable pair for jellies, for eating out of hand if you like the tartness, and for a shrub that fruits in partial afternoon shade better than a grape would. Gooseberries are the larger, often tarter fruit on a thornier bush.
Both are long-lived if you give them drainage, a mulch that is not piled on the canes, and a renewal pruning each year: take out a few of the oldest stems so the bush keeps young wood, which is where the fruit is best.
Black currants are a different flavor and a different history. They were restricted in places because of white pine blister rust, a fungus that moves between ribes and five-needle pines. Rules have changed and vary by state.
Before you plant a black currant, check the current rule where you live, and prefer cultivars selected for rust resistance if you are near valuable five-needle pines. Red and white currants and gooseberries have been the less controversial, and often the more productive, home fruits in this region. If the legal status is unclear, plant those and skip the argument.
Golden currant (Ribes aureum) is a western native shrub with fragrant yellow flowers and fruit that varies from tasty to ordinary depending on the plant. It is as much a high-plains and pollinator shrub as it is a fruit bush. Give it room. It will be larger than a tidy red currant.
Water them like a fruit bush, not like a cactus and not like a lawn. Even moisture while the fruit is sizing prevents a small, tough berry. Then let the soil surface dry.
In alkaline clay, currants are generally more forgiving than raspberries, which CSU lists among plants that chlorose. If your pH is high and your brambles are yellow, a currant is the rational substitute, not another raspberry and a bottle of iron.
Honeyberries, with the frost caveat
Honeyberries, also called haskaps, are cultivars of Lonicera caerulea. The shrubs are extremely cold-hardy. The problem is the calendar. They bloom very early, sometimes with the last of winter, and a frost that does nothing to the wood can wipe out the flowers.
In a mountain town that still freezes in June, you can have a healthy shrub and no fruit, which is the apricot story in a smaller package.
On the Front Range they are worth trying if you can cover the bushes on cold April nights or if your particular yard stays a few degrees warmer than the airport. Plant at least two unrelated cultivars. They are not reliably self-fruitful. A single bush is a foliage plant.
Buy named cultivars from a fruit nursery and read which pairs pollinate. Space them where you can throw a frost blanket over a hoop for the two weeks they bloom. If you will not cover them and your late 32°F date is in late May or June, plant a currant instead. The currant will not ask you to win April.
Serviceberry and the other natives
Serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia), also called saskatoon, is a native shrub or small tree with fruit that cooks and dries well and that birds will take seriously. Net a small planting if you want a share.
It handles cold and wind and fits the tree and shrub palette as well as the fruit garden. It can be slow to start. Water it the first summers. Then it is one of the lower-maintenance fruits you can own.
Chokecherry is more astringent, excellent in jelly with enough sugar, and a native windbreak plant.
It suckers. Plant it where a thicket is the goal. Nanking cherry, covered with the stone fruit, sits between a shrub and a cherry tree and is often the right size for a hail frame.
Grapes are a maybe. A short-season table grape against a south wall on the Front Range can ripen in a good year and fail in a cool one. In a 90-day mountain season, a grape is a vine you will prune and not a harvest you should count. Wine grapes are a site-specific industry in parts of western Colorado and are not a backyard assumption.
Blueberries are the wrong argument
Blueberries need acid soil. The Front Range, the Wasatch valleys, and most high-plains towns do not have it. CSU’s chlorosis guidance names blueberries among the acid-loving plants that do not fit these conditions, alongside azaleas and rhododendrons.
Sulfur in a planting hole does not convert a calcareous yard into a bog. You can grow a blueberry in a large container of straight acidic mix, watered with collected rain where that is legal and with a careful eye on salts, and you can call that a container project.
You cannot convert the vegetable garden. Currants are the regional answer to the same craving for a small, tart, reliable fruit.
Planting and a simple yearly habit
Full sun for the most fruit, afternoon shade tolerated by currants better than by honeyberries. Space so you can walk around each bush to prune and to pick.
A wide hole, native soil, flare or crown at grade, mulch on the soil. No daily lawn water. A drip line on the vegetable or the fruit valve, checked with a probe.
In late winter, remove dead and the oldest wood. In spring, if a frost is forecast during bloom on honeyberries or on serviceberry, cover them.
In June, net against birds before the fruit colors, not the morning you notice the robins. After harvest, water if July is dry so the shrub can set next year’s buds. Do not fertilize heavily. These are not corn.
Hail cloth on a permanent low frame over a row of currants is the highest-return fruit structure in a Front Range hail alley. The berries bruise, and a single June storm can take a year of jelly. The frame is the same idea as the vegetable hail page, built at shrub height.
Checklist
- Plant red or white currants and gooseberries before you plant another apricot.
- Check current black-currant rules if you want black currants, and prefer rust-resistant cultivars.
- Plant two honeyberry cultivars, and cover them in bloom if your frost dates are late.
- Skip in-ground blueberries on alkaline soil.
- Include serviceberry if you want a native shrub that also fruits.
- Net before the fruit colors.
- Prune out old wood. Do not shear the bush into a meatball.
- In hail country, put cloth over the row.
Strawberries and raspberries are the other small fruits, with different pruning and a winter-mulch requirement. They are the next page, strawberries and raspberries.
Sources
- CSU Extension, Iron Chlorosis of Woody Plants, including raspberry and acid-loving crops.
- University of Idaho Extension, BUL 859, on fruit cultivar choice in short, harsh seasons.
- USU Extension climate notes on frost pockets, which apply to early-blooming honeyberries as much as to apricots.
- CSU Extension, Colorado Vegetable Guide, on hail as a normal seasonal risk and on covers.