19/08/2026
This has been the year of the gooseberry.
You may (or may not) already know that I’m a lover of gooseberries. The fruity kind, rather than the threes-a-crowd kind.
You may also not really give a damn about what I love to eat. But there’s a lesson or three in here somewhere, if you care to keep reading.
Gooseberries, to me, are the quintessential taste of summer. This stems from my childhood. Granny grew various fruits and vegetables. We kept black, white, and red currants way back when red currants weren’t even trendy. And she grew two gooseberry bushes: one a large cooking variety and the other that produced tiny, golden spheres of pure sweetness with a spritz of rosewater and cucumber.
I didn’t really enjoy the cooking gooseberries that much. Picked unripe, hard, and sour enough to make your mouth pucker and fur your teeth, they need a massive amount of sugar and are traditionally used to make gooseberry fools and jams. I could take them or leave them.
But I loved the tiny dessert ones and ate them straight off the bush, even though, more often than not, they had a coating of mildew.
So, back in 2020, when everyone was working on their gardens, I started to convert most of my lawn into somewhere I could grow flowers and fruits. A haven for pollinators and, of course, gooseberries.
I also decided that, since the majority of fruits that you buy in shops were only a handful of varieties, bred for shelf stability and their capacity to survive being transported in crates in the back of a lorry and then sit on a shelf in a upermarket under bright lights for days or even a week or more before it sits in your fruitbowl for another week or so, that I’d grow unusual and heritage varieties.
�And somewhere in there is the first lesson: the fruits and vegetables that are sold in shops are often picked underripe, have been sprayed with who knows what to stop them from being eaten by pests, but also to stop them from going off, because fungi and bacteria are everywhere and have appetites rivalling competitive eaters. And varieties bred for shelf stability and better transit often lose something of their flavour and texture. Take wild strawberries, for example. They’re so delicate, and their shelf life is so short that you never find them in the shops. They would have turned into mouldy, raw jam long before reaching your table. Yet the flavour of conventional, hybrid strawberries can’t compare at all. They don’t come close.
Which is why my tiny plot is full of them. And not just clumps of alpine strawberries, but truly wild, once-a-year Irish strawberries that I liberated from a hedge in Limavady while buying organic pork and chicken during lockdown. And green or creamy strawberries, which also excelled this year. They don’t turn that red, and their flesh remains the firmest of all the strawberries I’ve tried, but in a good summer with plenty of sun, they taste incredibly sweet with just the right amount of tartness and a fascinating nutty flavour that makes them taste like strawberry jam. It’s a shame they’re such shy bearers of fruit.
But getting back to the gooseberries, 2020 was also the year that I discovered that you can spend hours reading up on and deciding on the ideal varieties of fruit to order, spend the next year or two trying to coax them into providing you with a bountiful crop, only to discover that they’ve been mislabelled. That was my experience with the first two gooseberry bushes I bought. I thought I was buying 2 red varieties: Whinham’s Industry and Hinnonmaki Red, both famous for being delicious, sweet gooseberries you can eat straight off the bush. What I got was one bush with mealy, sparse berries with no flavour and the largest leaves of a gooseberry I’ve ever seen. The other was a good bearer, but produced tiny red fruits with a pleasant sweet and sour tang, and which weren’t Whinham’s Industry.
The common gooseberryness that all gooseberries have to varying degrees is a vegetal taste. The closest I can describe it is somewhere between a cucumber and a courgette (zucchini). Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it.
Unfortunately, I also learned the same way that it’s far harder to get your hands on true musk strawberries. And most years since 2020, I’ve been trying to get the real deal. So far, I’ve grown alpine strawberries, creamy strawberries, and had plants that were supposedly musk but turned out to be hybrid strawberries — all labelled as musk strawberries. This year, I’m trying again. So, I have lots of tiny, baby strawberry plants, which hopefully will turn out to be real honest-to-god musk strawberries next year or the following one.
And that is how I got obsessed with finding the right gooseberry varieties.
Now I have 8!
All of them are the dessert sort. The ones sweet enough to eat straight off the bush. Three are red (Hinnonmaki Red, Black Velvet — a red so deep it’s purple when fully ripe — and the original Whinham’s Industry imposter, which I suspect is a gooseberry-currant hybrid). Black Velvet and Hinnonmaki Red are sweet-tart with strong red berry flavours and perhaps a spritz of something floral. They’re also sharper than most of the others.
Two are indisputably white, while another may be white, yellow, or green, depending on whom you ask. This year, with all the sunshine, it was more yellow. That one is allegedly Leveller, supposedly a giant gooseberry and one of the best yellow varieties. But so far, it’s not grown gooseberries anywhere near the size of my largest white one, and the flavour is nice but nowhere near as good as my golden gooseberry.
One of the white ones bears humongous gooseberries, sweet with a mild flavour. The last few years, it only bore fruit on a few branches. This year, it was covered all over with them, although the fruits themselves were less flavourful this year than others.
The other white one narrowly avoided being shovel-pruned this year. Really, I didn’t get around to it, so I left it to grow with relative neglect, aiming to root it out this autumn and replace it with something more flavoursome. But either the doses of patentkali that I gave it last autumn and a couple of times this year, the remarkably sunny and dry summer weather, or the threat of removal did something to it. This gooseberry was meant to be a Langley Gage, reputed as being the sweetest and most delicious of all gooseberries and up until this summer, it had been nothing but disappointingly bland. But this year was a revelation. It was second only to the golden-amber gooseberry for sweetness and a really delightful berry. It will be getting more patentkali in the autumn and the spring again. It’s still not Langley Gage, but it’s a great producer and apparently can produce fabulous gooseberries; it’s hardy, and it seems to thrive on neglect. So, it’s earned its keep.
There’s a young one that hasn’t fruited yet, but it’s meant to be a green dessert variety: Hinnonmaki Green. So far, it’s still sitting in a pot because I had planned on putting it where the Langley Gage fraud is. But now I can’t because I’m keeping that one.
The final one is a deep golden amber. This one reminds me most of the tiny, sweet gooseberries of my childhood, complete with a tendency to mildew. However, this bush is a rampant, tall bush, much larger than the one my mum believes was the classic Golden Drop, one of the most delicious gooseberries ever grown. The golden gooseberry in my garden I grew from cuttings I took from an ancient gooseberry bush that I discovered in a hedge at the end of a lane. Many years ago, farmers used to plant gooseberries and other fruit trees in hedgerows so that they could pick them as they passed, often taking their cows to and from the milking parlour. A delicious treat. I’m glad I took the cuttings when I did because the parent plant died a couple of years later. This gooseberry is the sweetest of all the ones I grow. Nectar wrapped up in a hairy, firm, little Irish grape. It’s almost too sweet to stand. I love it. And it has a richness to it that’s more delicious than most grapes, with a hint of flowers and greengage plums, and a suggestion of the gooseberry flavour.
This plant is a pernickety one in my garden, and it might be because of where I’ve planted it. Which is right beside my Madame Alfred Periere (MAP) rose. The MAP is an aggressively growing beast of a thing covered with the sorts of prickles and thorns that would have stymied the prince in Sleeping Beauty. It seems to hoover minerals, particularly sulphur, potassium, and magnesium, out of the soil to fuel its rapid growth of canes and a plentitude of buds and flowers in late spring. This bush can quickly turn the ground around its roots into a nutrient graveyard. Early in the spring, it throws out lots of leaves and canes, with those ridiculous thorns. It’s the healthiest-looking plant when it does this. But as soon as the buds flower (and their scent is intoxicating), it seems to have exhausted the minerals in the soil, and it starts to develop rampant black spot.
The fascinating thing is that when MAP is thriving, so are the plants around it. But when it starts to blackspot, so does the new, little New Dream rose beside it and the golden gooseberry next door starts to drop its berries while the tips of the tallest new growth begin to mildew. This seems to have nothing to do with the weather conditions, as it happens when wet or dry or wet after dry or dry after it’s been rainy. However, this year, I repeated a good dose of Patentkali, which is a granular mineral treatment containing potassium, sulphur, and magnesium, and the mildew has stayed at bay, although the leaves turned red.
Which brings me to my second lesson: plants are surprisingly similar to animals, and yes, I’m including humans here. When we become nutrient-depleted, we lose our resilience to disease, including infections. Mildew is a mould. Humans don’t develop mildew, but we can develop all sorts of fungal infections, including candida, and bacterial infections, including small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
Humans are holobionts. So are plants. A holobiont is an organism made up of a colony of other living organisms. Coral reefs are the classic example. But we ourselves form plenty of human cells, of course. However, we also are home to a host of tiny, living organisms, so that barely an atom of our exterior surface, our guts, ge***al tracts, and even respiratory tracts isn’t home to some sort of tiny microbe.
Plants have equally, if not more so, complicated relationships with microbes, largely underground. Their root systems are entangled with mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria. The plants feed these microbes sugars, amino acids, and simple compounds. The underground soil microbiome mines rocks for minerals and provides plants with these and many far more complex compounds, many of which are polyphenols and other compounds. Some of these help to provide the plants with antimicrobial protection. So, some of those polyphenols that you find in plants aren’t made directly by the plants themselves, but by the fungi they form symbiotic relationships with.
Meanwhile, almost all the nitrogen that plants and animals use comes directly or indirectly from the nitrogen-fixing bacteria found in some plants, often in the legume family. The bacteria inside the rumens of cows and sheep can also take nitrogen in plants that’s not already in the form of amino acids and proteins and convert it into protein, which we can benefit from. So, ruminants and other herbivores actually upcycle nitrogen, making it far more bioavailable. Yes, you get more protein out of a cow than you put in because of this.
Many of these microbes are actively helpful. They can help break down toxins, support elimination of toxic compounds or prevent their reabsorption, generate nutrients, including vitamins, produce antimicrobial compounds that help to regulate less friendly microbes, and even synthesise neurotransmitters, including serotonin.
Unfortunately, others are hooligans, apparently intent on causing havoc and rioting. Despite our bodies being wonderful hosts for all sorts of microbes that could live in harmony, some of them seem intent on mayhem and destruction. Still others will live and let live… so long as they aren’t threatened. But as soon as you introduce anything they could remotely interpret as a threat, you’ll quickly discover they believe that a good offence is the best defence.
In tandem, these miscreants can be the source of a lot of toxicity inside your body when circumstances turn hostile. And naturally, the gentle, sweet, helpful microbes that are providing you a service are the ones that also seem to often be the most delicate and vulnerable to adverse circumstances.
Those adverse circumstances can be myriad:
Antibiotics
Preservatives — mostly from food, of course. However, medications also can contain preservatives, as can skin products, which are absorbed through the skin. And one of their routes of elimination is through the bile, so you may be able to trace them entering your gut to mess with your microbiome, too
Other toxicants entering your body through your skin, inhaled air, and ge***alia (yes, even tampons can release chemicals that are easily absorbed)
Food additives — not just preservatives but artificial sweeteners (aspartame may be metabolised to formaldehyde, for example), colourings, flavourings, and many other compounds
Pesticides — again, mostly through food, but have you ever played golf or sprayed your lawn with Roundup?
Medications — did you know that statins were discovered from red yeast rice, which makes it to attack other microbes and fight for its survival and access to food and not on the off chance that humans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries got a bee in their bonnets about their blood cholesterol levels?
Hell, even large amounts of some carbohydrates, fibres, polyphenols, and plant fats, proteins and amino acids, can completely upset your microbial balance. This isn’t limited to sugars or even starches. There are plenty of sugar alcohols, poorly digested proteins, like gluten and wheat germ agglutinin, weird and wonderful plant fats, like erucic acid…
And then there are the oxalates. Which I’ve written about before, and I will again. Satan’s laxatives. Destroyer of teeth. Bone crushers. Mother of joint pains. George R R Martin should write about the torture oxalates are responsible for.
So, you decide you’ll cut them out of your diet. Cold turkey. The less you have the better, right?
Wrong.
Because oxalates slow your metabolism. And they accumulate in crystals throughout your body. They cause pain, toxicity, mitochondrial dysfunction…
So, what’s wrong with just stopping them?
Here’s the third, and arguably most important, lesson.
When you suddenly stop the oxalates in your diet, your metabolism starts to recover. Great right? Sure…
Until your pancake-flat metabolism starts to transform into a mountain that becomes ever more Everest-like in nature. That in itself isn’t a problem. It’s the consequences and juggling that you won’t be prepared for.
First, a rapidly increasing metabolism also results in a metabolism that decides it suddenly has the resources to start fixing all the stuff that it never had the resources to before. Which is all fine and dandy…
Until you run out of the raw materials: vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fats, antioxidants. You can suddenly shoot right through recovery into a rather hard and unforgiving brick wall, where all your nutrients are suddenly occupied at precisely the moment you’ve ramped up your production of enzymes that are crying out for even more of them. Your production and recycling of ATP (adenosine triphosphate, or more strictly, the magnesium-ATP complex, what’s usually referred to as your “universal energy currency). Each ATP molecule requires one magnesium to stabilise the three phosphates. Yes, three phosphates. And this becomes a problem because your phosphate and magnesium pools are probably more puddles than oceans. And running out of them can cause hiccups inside cells that need energy.
In case you were wondering, heart cells, neurons, liver cells, kidney cells, and active muscle cells are the most energy-hungry of all. Naturally, they will also often manifest the signs of metabolic blocks first: dysautonomia, palpitations, lightheadedness, fatigue, muscle twitches, poor blood sugar management, overwhelmed detoxification pathways, fluid retention, neuropathies, brain fog, forgetfulness, concentration problems.
We call this refeeding syndrome. It’s a spectrum.
How severely this will manifest depends on the magnitude of the gap between your stores, their availability, and how fast your metabolism runs.
Most people will likely only experience mild inconveniences and discomforts: grumpiness, fatigue, headaches, cramps, indigestion, IBS, sleep disturbances, mild flu-like sensations.
Those who are at the most severe end of the scale, typically anorexics, people whose chronic coeliac disease is eventually managed, people with inflammatory bowel disease, starvation, severe and brutal weight loss, gastric bypass surgery, people treated with GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic and Wegovy), are at greatest risk. For these people, refeeding can be life-threatening.
While the term refeeding syndrome is usually reserved for those at the most severe end of the spectrum, the same biochemical changes on a smaller scale happen anytime that a deficit in your metabolism rapidly disappears. It’s just that this is almost never recognised. And oxalates, or more specifically, stopping them cold turkey, can trigger this.
Secondly, when your metabolism improves, and you’re no longer squirrelling away oxalates from your diet into crystals (which incidentally are a nasty combination of oxalates, calcium, phosphate, uric acid, minerals like iron, zinc, copper, and manganese, and, most horrifyingly of all, heavy metals, including gadolinium, mercury, lead, cadmium, nickel, arsenic — shhhh, we’re going to call it a heavy metal, ok? — barium, radium, and radionuclides) like it’s some sort of Olympic sport, you can start to dissolve those crystals. Opposites attract. Negatively charged oxalates MUST bind with positively charged metals. They actually have no choice here.
Again, on the surface, this might seem like all your dreams are coming true.
However, this is called oxalate dumping.
Because as these crystals begin to dissolve, they release everything that they’re holding onto. And that potentially includes a host of undesirable small toxins that can flood your system and redistribute into your cells and mitochondria before they have a chance to make it out of your body.
That, and releasing a massive load of positively and negatively charged compounds in equal measure, will predictably result in a massive pressure for new crystals to start forming all over your body. Crystals that grow and suck in nutrients, including minerals like calcium, magnesium, zinc, and copper, and even negatively charged B vitamins, which traverse your bloodstream with phosphate groups attached to make them more negative. This process can become a black hole for nutrients, leaving you depleted.
And it’s a major part of my ATTRACT cascade (Accumulating Toxicants and Their Reactive Attraction Compromises Tissues).
What has this got to do with gooseberries?
Well, it turns out that balancing your oxalate intake can become a skill more difficult than crossing a tightrope on a unicycle while juggling fire brands, blindfolded.
You must try to hit the Goldilocks amount of dietary oxalates to allow your metabolism to increase, but not too much, so the oxalate and other crystals dissolve, but not too fast.
And gooseberries, and other berries, as well as kiwis and, in the winter, dark chocolate, are my preferred levers for fine-tuning my oxalate intake.
At the same time, I have to take enough biotin and other B vitamins, magnesium and other minerals, and sulphate to keep everything ticking over whilst trying not to trigger too much ongoing crystallisation. Without these supplements, the oxalates in gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries, wineberries, and tayberries dissolve the enamel and dentin in my teeth, attack my joints and make me miserable.
But without some oxalates, the oxalate dumping takes over, and I end up with tanking nutrients, carnitine that ends up in my boots, and calling Huey down the great white telephone for about 12 hours straight.
So, that’s my relationship with gooseberries. Not in a nutshell. But hopefully, it was worth it.
Let me know in the comments if you think you’ve ever experienced oxalate dumping or oxalate issues.
And let me know what you’d like me to explain more of, because I know we covered a lot today!
🍇 ❤️
