New York Agricultural Experiment Station. 301 



The foreign kinds as well as their seedlings that have originated 

 in this country are properly called European gooseberries. As a 

 class they are often called English gooseberries because so many 

 of them have originated in England, but fine varieties of goose- 

 berries are grown in other parts of Europe, and this designation 

 of the class is objectionable. 



Size of fruit. — Some of the European kinds bear the largest 

 gooseberries known and, as a class, they yield much larger fruit 

 than do any of the American sorts. Compare plate XIV, which 

 shows the natural size of the fruit of some varieties of the Amer- 

 ican class, with plates XV to XX inclusive, which show the 

 natural size of some European sorts, European gooseberries 

 have been grown here which measured over one and a half inches 

 long and an inch thick, and this is not an extraordinary size for 

 some varieties. The fruit of the Downing, a well-known Ameri- 

 can sort, averages about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, 

 and that is large for an American gooseberry. At gooseberry 

 shows in England, single specimens weighing over an ounce and 

 a half avoirdupois have been exhibited. The large fruit sells 

 better in market than the small fruit, as may be seen by examin- 

 ing the market quotations for 1896, given on a subsequent page. 



Color of fruit. — The European varieties possess another advan- 

 tage in having a much wider range of colors than do the Ameri- 

 can kinds. They may be either dark red, dull green or clear 

 yellow, or they may vary through various combinations and paler 

 shades of these colors to nearly white, while American varieties 

 show only green or red in the colors of their fruit. Some of the 

 latter, as Houghton, have fruit of a beautiful clear red color that 

 is unrivalled by any of the European gooseberries that I have 

 seen. 



Marlceting the green fruit. — The gooseberry holds a unique posi- 

 tion among cultivated fruits because its fruit may be marketed 

 either green or ripe. The large European gooseberries reach 

 marketable size for unripe fruit somewhat earlier than the 

 American kinds do, and this gives them another advantage over 

 American gooseberries, for the early prices are usually much 



