Fathers' Day Celebration

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With the Tea Room open and the operation in "full swing", we had such a great Mothers' Day, we decided to do something special for Fathers' Day on June 15th.

We're now taking reservations for Chef's especially conceived "manly" menu, a choice of 2:

1. A delicious 8 oz. Kent Heritage natural beef patty, pan seared on a toasted challah bun, topped with local lettuce, sweet madras mayonnaise, house smoked bacon, tomato relish and a fried egg. Served with a side of house made potato chips.

2. A trio tasting of sliders, including a Ling cod tempura with tartar sauce, a Beef patty with our in house tomato relish, and a Portobello slider topped with wild pesto. Served with a side of house made potato salad.

Meanwhile on the farm, this week has all revolved around bees!

We have wanted to start a few of our own colonies. We need the pollinators and can always use the honey. However, we have so many projects on hand, we decided to take a "short cut" this year. We are "renting" our farm to a bee keeper, in return for honey.

So this week, we took delivery of 176 hives.

A major bee delivery

We have some great site for bees: lots of blooms, shade and water. Where the colonies were installed is actually looking like a suburban condo community for bees.

Our bee condo community

It will not be long before we can sell Ridge Berry honey.

Of course, our need for honey is also based on our wine making aspirations. Now that the weather is clear, we decided to return to our fruit wine making experiments. We stopped for the winter when we discovered how sensitive the process is to temperature.

Now we can start again with our new 50 liter fermentor. Scaling up is proving somewhat difficult for lack of space. In fact, we had to set-up our new operation in the corner of our house kitchen.

Our new and assembled fermentor "tucked away" in the kitchen corner

We did not realize that scaling up to 50 litres means a variety of logistical details (like handling the pasteurization of the honey water combination and the transfer of liquids from one container to another). We had to improvise and with a good siphoning hose managed to work everything out, although ultimately we will need to arrange for some proper pumps.

The height of our stove and a makeshift stand for the fermenter helped siphoning from one container to the other

A feature of this fermenter is a lower plate which acts as a filter. This means that we can directly add the fruits to our mead and the resulting must is easy to filter.

So for our first batch, we decided to make a Raspberry wine. Our recipe roughly calls for 1 kg if honey for every 2 litres of water. To this we add about the same amount of fruit as honey.

Frozen Raspberries ready for honey, water and yeast

Now, it's a waiting game!

For those following our foraging activities, this week it was time to pick the Garlic Mustard and the stinging Nettles. Both are young and tender, ready for the picking.

We have no shortage of Garlic Mustard

The young Nettle is also ready for picking

We have experimented with these plants last year and found them to be a great food. This year, Chef has decided to use them in a Wild Pesto mix (and part of our Fathers' Day menu).

It is amazing what you can do by blending Olive Oil with Nettles, Garlic Mustard, Ramps and Walnuts (a variation on Italy's "Pesto di Ortica").

Chef's Wild Pesto

We'll close this week by saying that things are not all work on the farm. In fact, one of our neighbours dropped by with a "mean" quad ATV. It was not long before Tristan was offering rides...of course he wants one of these now.

A real break from farm work.