Photo: Nadiatalent — CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Survives zone 3 through 7
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
The wild parent of nearly all North American gooseberry cultivars — smooth-skinned fruit, smaller than European types but hardier and healthier, good fresh or in jam and pie.
- Hardiness
- Zone 3–7
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- June–Aug
- Mature size
- Bush 1–1.5 m; excellent in containers
- Light
- Partial to full sun
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Alberta to Nova Scotia, south to West Virginia, west to Nebraska; fens, sedge meadows, riverbottom forest and rocky openings.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- ~3 yrs to first crop; a 10-15 year productive life once bearing begins
- Growth speed
- Fast, though nurseries describe it reaching its ~1.2 m mature size at a medium pace over about 15 years.
- Spacing
- 107 cm (42 in) apart — about 1.1 m² (12 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Nearly round, 1–3.5 × 2–4 cm, palmately lobed with 3 major and 2 smaller lobes, shallow rounded teeth, hairy petioles.
- Root system
- Suckering — forms thickets and is easily divided for propagation.
- Fruit description
- Smooth-skinned, spineless, ovoid to spherical berries 8–10 mm across, blue to black to dark purple; pleasant, mildly acidic-sweet flavor.
- Propagation
- Stem cuttings, the standard method for cultivated gooseberries; seed also viable.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
Fertilizing. No fertilizer needed in the planting year; from year two, about 6-8 oz of a balanced 10-10-10 fertilizer each spring in an 18-inch ring around the plant.
Growing tips. Notably less thorny than European gooseberry (R. uva-crispa); the cultivar 'Poorman' is bred nearly thornless. A genuine source of American gooseberry mildew resistance bred into modern cultivars.
Companion planting. Rated moderate/variable blister rust potential in USFS hazard studies. More practically: it's the genetic source behind most modern American gooseberry cultivars, many of which were specifically bred for better rust and mildew tolerance than the wild species itself.
Grow journal
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