Are there any fruit plants that dont do well in ericaceous compost

OK So if i wanted to grow gooseberry , what should i pot it in . Should i just use compost with John Innes 3 ?

 

Yes if you want, or you could use straight JI3, or add garden soil to your compost. Will need a biggish pot.
Note if you look you can find thornless gooseberries, no idea what they are like, but probably the fruit will be less sweet when ripe and smaller than traditional varieties. Golden Drop is a good desert gooseberry large sweet fruit when ripe, Hedgehog is another good old variety; you can also get varieties that are red when ripe.

 

Those bags of compost that say"with added John Innes" or some such waffly phrase - I think it just means there's some loam in there, not that it's made to the actual John Innes formula. Unless it says on the bag, it's impossible to know how much loam. I think you could get a similar effect by mixing some bagged topsoil (readily available from e.g. Wickes) with regular multipurpose compost. You don't need ericaceous compost unless you're growing an ericaceous plant like blueberry, cranberry, rhododendron etc.

Whatever compost you use, the nutrients in it will be exhausted after the first year and you'll need to use fertiliser, and maybe add more compost, particularly if the level has sunk which tends to happen a lot with modern non-peat or reduced-peat composts as the wood chip, bark, green waste etc in them continues to rot down. You can do that by top dressing or by carefully removing the plant from the pot and adding more compost in the bottom. Long-term container planting isn't maintenance-free!

 

Im planning on using the following pot and planting a gooseberry plant in it
Glazed terracotta tulip pot - misty green
its just arrived however its apparanet that the diameter of the base is much less than at the top

 

Yes i have noticed this and am ok to apply more compost but my issue is always that the compost can only be applied to the surface so im never sure as to whether nutrients in any newly applied compost will actually get to the roots