Why the soft fruit bonanza?

Does anyone have a clue why this year's soft fruit harvest has been so good?

The blackcurrant glut has been so severe that the boughs of the plants are bent to the ground under the weight of fruit, and we've got a good load of fruit off our still-small whitecurrant bush.

Is it the cold winter killing off the gooseberry sawfly, the hot summer, the wet spring, or just the fact that I've done more mulching of the fruit bushes than in previous years?

Comments

[Gnome]

I wish we could say the same up here. We had a fantastic glut last year when we inherited our plot and I can remember standing in one place for an hour and picking 5 lbs of blackcurrants. Then at the beginning of this year we pruned back hard and mulched. Fantastic leaves and new branches but very little fruit. One adviser tells me to make cetain to use tomato feed when the bushes flower next spring.