Fruit vegetables
Cape gooseberry
Physalis peruviana
Timings for your region
No region chosen yet — timings are for the Moderate climate band · Choose your region
Start indoorsmid February – mid March
Plantingmid May – early June
Harvestearly September – mid October
Practical tip
It is only ripe once the papery husk is dry and strawy and the fruit drops of its own accord — before that it tastes hard and resinous. Unripe fruit does not belong on the plate.
Origin & history
The cape gooseberry comes from the high valleys of Peru, Colombia and Ecuador, where it is a short-lived perennial that crops for several years. European settlers took it to the Cape of Good Hope around 1800 and on to Australia and New Zealand — which is where the name comes from, and it tells you nothing about where the plant is from. Botanically it is a nightshade, a relative of tomato and potato rather than of the gooseberry. It only reached German gardens once the fruit appeared in supermarkets in the 1990s; here it is usually grown as an annual, because the first frost finishes it in the open ground — in a tub it can be overwintered.
Varieties
Named varieties are rare; a lot of it is sold simply as cape gooseberry or physalis. Looking for one still pays off: “Schönbrunner Gold” ripens markedly earlier than unnamed stock and is the sensible choice for a short season, “Little Lantern” stays more compact, and large-fruited types such as “Kolumbianische Riesen” want more heat than a German summer delivers. Check the botanical name: Physalis philadelphica is the tomatillo — green, far larger and dependent on a second plant — and the Chinese lantern, Physalis alkekengi, is an ornamental whose berries have no business in the kitchen.
Care
The seed germinates in light: press it onto the surface, do not cover it, and keep it at 20 to 24 degrees, because anything cooler takes weeks. Unlike a tomato, nothing is pinched out later on — the fruit sits in the leaf axils of the side shoots, so cutting those away cuts the crop away. Go easy on nitrogen or you get a lot of foliage and little underneath. Water evenly; it forgives a dry spell better than any other fruiting vegetable. In a tub it can be overwintered: cut it back to 30 cm in October and keep it bright, almost dry and at 5 to 10 degrees, and in its second year it flowers weeks earlier.
What can go wrong
The real trouble is the calendar: from September it ripens fruit by fruit over several weeks, and in harsh areas half of it still hangs green on the plant when the first frost arrives. The only answers are an early-ripening variety and a pre-culture started right at the beginning of the window — every week lost in February is missing in October. Individual flowers dropping in heat or after cold nights is nothing to worry about, the plant makes that up. Slugs go for freshly planted stock. Like tomato and potato it is prone to verticillium wilt: keep three to four years between them.
Harvest, storage & kitchen
Put straw or a sheet of fleece under the plant: the fruit that drops stays clean and you simply gather it up every few days. Left in its closed husk somewhere cool and airy it keeps for several weeks — very little else out of the summer bed lasts that long. Before the first frost, cut the whole plant and hang it upside down somewhere frost-free; anything that has already taken on colour finishes off there. In the kitchen they work fresh with cheese, as a chutney with onion and vinegar, or dipped in chocolate; for jam you need apple or preserving sugar, because on their own they barely set.
All timings are guide values for the given climate, not a guarantee. Weather, aspect and variety all have a say.