Snow for the New Year

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We wish all our readers, family and friends a very happy and prosperous New Year....and want to thank you all for a month of record readership!

For our farm, the Holiday Season has been joyful, but like the rest of the American North East, we finally got our dose of Winter snow. This is where you really learn to appreciate the country community, where neighbors actually come unannounced to clear your driveway (something we certainly have never experienced in the city).

Although we were not hit as hard as Montreal, we still managed to accumulate our fair share....and this is now making work on the Kiwi trellises impossible.

With a professional Swiss forester on hand (Alois Dober was over for the Holidays), this did not deter us from at least tackling one major project: clearing trees.

We decided this week would be ideal for the clearing of some large pines on our ridge.

Five of these trees were damaged by the overgrown vines that we had cleared last summer. In fact up to two third of their branches were dead (in one case it was the entire tree).

If we were to do anything this was the time. When our Spring planting starts, removal of the trees would have been extremely difficult.

Tristan and I took the opportunity to learn a thing or two from Alois, such as how to use a wedge and a sledge hammer to ensure the tree falls where you want it to (most important when you're working close to a house!).

This was also an opportunity to try the old Massey Ferguson in the snow. We ended up using it to clear the trees from the ridge and the old tractor performed marvelously.

Having cleared the trees, it was time for a major clean up and again we had to start a large burn. In this case, we decided to keep the large logs; these we will let dry to make Swedish candles (for those not familiar with the concept, I'll explain it in the Spring when we expect to light our first candle).

With half of the site cleaned up, we were stalled again (because of more snow!) and we now hope to finish the job next week.

In any case, we are quite happy with the result of this week's work. We now have a much better view of our land from the house....and of course a much better view of the back of the house. You can now clearly see the second bell tower on the South side of the west wing.

The snowy weather provided a lot of time to finalize and confirm our orders of new stock for Spring planting (something we are now really looking forward to).

So on their way to our farm (sometime in April), we have:

375 red raspberry plants,

240 cassis (or black currant) plants,

150 yellow raspberry plants,

168 red gooseberry plants, and

50 purple raspberry plants (to fill some gaps in our current rows).

We also decided to order 10 Chestnut trees from Grimo, a great local nursery specializing in nut trees. 

We love Chestnuts and it is an extremely versatile food. In North America, we only tend to think of roasted chestnuts. However, these nuts can be used as a delicious vegetable side dish (great with game), as a desert (the key ingredient to our Christmas cake), preserved (they make a delectable "puree" and they are highly prized when glazed), flour (for both breads and pastas - a Corsican specialty), and even beer!

We're obviously looking forward to having some productive Chestnut trees.

In the meantime the snow, provides a great backdrop to our forest and tree line. It allows us to identify a lot of the trees previously hidden by the brush.

In our tree line, we actually found two very tall trees of the genus "Platanus",  more commonly known as Sycamore. We are in fact on the very northern edge of its habitat in North America (Candice in the picture below provides scale to one of our Sycamores).

I must finish the blog this week by saying that this editor is off to Kuala Lumpur next weekend. Tristan and I will be in Asia for a very short time but this means that our next posting will not be before January 20th...see you then!

Happy Holidays from Ridge Berry Farm

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Well it looks like Winter is actually upon us. Friday was the Winter solstice and Saturday we finally had a good amount of snow on the ground. So we may yet enjoy a white Christmas this year.

It is with this in mind that I would like to start this blog by wishing all of our readers a very happy holiday season, whether you have just celebrated Solstice or intend to celebrate Festivus. We hope you have a chance to enjoy some great times with friends, family and loved ones.

On our side, the tradition is a family feast on Christmas eve (what in France we refer to as the "reveillon"). Over the years, we have adopted a traditional meal from the Normand side of the family: roasted goose with chestnuts. And for the first time in many years, the farm has allowed us to have the entire family together along with some very special friends....so we certainly have a lot to be thankful for.

We have prepared this quick little Christmas card for all of you. It was produced from a photograph by local artist Divino Mucciante. It is our new home in snow (obviously taken during a previous winter).

The Holiday Season has not stopped Tristan and I from our work on the farm this week. Although the weather was wet (culminating in snow), we were determined to finish our Kiwi trellises.

For a couple of novices, this week was really difficult and I was almost ready to entitle this post "trellis cable hell". 

As indicated last week, we planted one row of T-bar shaped trellises extending over 175 feet (or almost 44 meters). The next step was to string 5 rows of 12.5 gauge steel wire through the horizontal portion of these posts. The first line went fine.

Then the swearing began! It turns out that coiled steel cable has a tremendous amount of "shape memory". As such, by the time we got to the second line, we were effectively dealing with a monstrosity of a tangle in our coiled wire (very much what a lot of us have experienced when playing with and then really messing up a Slinky toy).

What we thought would take less than an hour now took the better part of an entire day!

The next step were the end post anchors. We fared no better at this task. First by mistake, I had ordered anchor augers which were much too short (18 inches). In our sandy soil these proved unstable and we really needed at least 3 feet (or 1 meter) in length. This required a quick run to our local co-op Vineland Growers.

Next came the tensioning concept which we had seen on a Youtube video for Kiwi trellises. This called for  inserting piece of  rebar (or "reinforcing bar") between at least two runs of wire extending from the anchor auger to the anchor bolt on the post. This rebar is then used to twist the cables together to the proper tension and finally it is tied to the resulting twisted cable. 

DO NOT DO THIS if your cable has any "shape memory". Once you attempt to tie the rebar to the twisted wire you face a very dangerous situation where the rebar could rapidly whip itself out of your grasp with a significant amount of torsion (a great way to lose a few teeth).

In the end, after a very long and very hard day of work, neither Tristan nor I were really pleased with the results. The process was too difficult, some aspects proved dangerous (even the coiling cable when let go could spring wildly) and the result did not look like something we could keep under reasonable tension (things would likely get worse in the heat of the summer - meaning we would have to install "in line" or "on line" tensioning mechanisms).

Defeated we slept on this and looked for other solutions....and the next day we had it!

We decided to completely change the steel cabling and use a 12.5 gauge Polyamide cable. I had discovered this cable doing some searches on trellising. Marketed as Dura-Line in North America, this material has been used in Italian vineyards for a while with some success. I had bought a spool of this material with the intention of testing it to "string" raspberry canes.

It turns out that not only this material has very high tensile strength, but it also has a low coefficient of thermal expansion (so it will not "relax" in the summer heat). It is light weight and can be installed with ease.

Re-doing our cabling turned out to be a "breeze". We were done in less than an hour and the cabling which was tensioned with our cable vices seemed perfect. Although more expensive than steel, the Polyamide cable was worth every penny.

The next issue to tackle were the post anchoring cables. For this we turned to the vineyards of Niagara for a solution and adopted a standard Gripple anchor kit. Although it did require a special tool, the result was a clean and safe installation where we had full control of the final tension.

We were so pleased with the final result we decided to start a second row. This one will prove more difficult as we are attempting to install the trellises around Kiwi vines which have not been pruned (hoping to prune them later when we are ready to install the healthiest vines on the trellises). 

This step now requires us to build a row of over 230 feet (some 59 meters). Based on the odd spacing of the vines we cannot have equidistant spacing to the posts, so we have decided to standardize on a minimum of 15 feet and a maximum of 25 feet between posts (leading to some 13 or 14 trellis posts in total).

I should also note that some of these vines will also have to be disentangled from each other, as well as wild plum trees (not an easy process).

We're now half way through and on hold because of the snow. Hopefully it may melt and give us an opportunity to finish before Spring.

On the renovation front, the country market is taking shape. This week the framing was started and we can begin to imagine how our new space will be used.

We always enjoy sighting wildlife on the farm. Although I've not yet been able to capture them on film, the deer are often in the back (in fact getting closer to the house with Winter now upon us). Of course, the packs of coyotes follow close behind and are often heard close to the house in the evenings.

We still notice quite a few species of birds and this week, it seems a pair of Mallards have made their home in our back pond. Based on the frolicking and mating rituals going on, we'd love to see if they adopt this pond as a nesting site.

More importantly though we also managed to capture this little fellow on film.

This is one of the rarest woodpeckers in Ontario: a male Red-Bellied Woodpecker. Southern Ontario is the northern limit of its natural habitat and it prefers old deciduous tree lots (like our piece of Carolinian forest).

With these kinds of sightings, we are now keen to take our wildlife photography more seriously. Although we've been using a small Olympus to take all of our photos in this blog, I think it is now time to deploy our Canon SLR with its telephoto lens.

Arctic Kiwi Trellises

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For International readers of the blog who always consider Canada a land of ice and snow, well it is nearly Christmas and in this part of Canada no snow yet! The result is more time to work our land.

While doing more Kiwi weeding, this week's more interesting project was to develop and construct a trellising system for these fruits. The problem with our Kiwis is that they were originally trellised using a structure conventional to grape vines, basically a vertical row of three steel cables.

After over a decade the results are Kiwis which have "fallen" on themselves, producing very few fruits (if any - it depends if they were a female or male vine).

We also had "lucky" Kiwis that managed to grasp onto saplings and extend their vines with the growing trees. These Kiwi vines had much greater access to sunshine and produced the majority of the fruits we harvested this fall.

The trellises required of Kiwis resemble arbors, allowing the vines to grow upwards to the sun. One solution is a T-bar trellis with horizontal cables. This we determined we would try for the one row of Kiwis which we had aggressively pruned earlier this fall.

To make these trellises we used 10 foot 4x4 lumber posts and 5 foot 2x4 cross beams. After some trial and error, we managed to create notches at the top of our beams where the 2x4's would sit. These were mounted using anchor bolts.

We decided on mounting five horizontal cables to the cross beams, so each of these were drilled appropriately to fit a 12.5 gauge steel cable. The key to the installation however resides on the tension applied to the cables over the length of the trellis. To achieve this we bought some wire vices, a device that only allows the cable to move in one direction (and locks in the other). We found these at  Dubois, a Canadian supplier of vineyard and orchard equipment based in Quebec with just superb service. These nifty mechanisms were mounted on the end trellises.

The next step was the actual installation of the assembled posts. For this step we had to acquire a new tool: a Stihl earth auger. With this auger we drilled 6 inch post holes and attempted to go at least 3 feet into the ground (we used an extension to the auger bit).

We wanted to achieve a trellis height of at least 6 feet, at most 7. We ended up standardizing on 75 inches.

Although the recommended spacing between posts is 15 feet, we ended up installing ours 25 feet apart. We had to do this in order to accommodate the existing Kiwi spacing while also trying to minimize our lumber costs. Hopefully this will be adequate (we will certainly find out as our Kiwis grow).

For our first row, we ended up with 7 posts extending over 175 feet.

Now we are preparing for the cabling which will be next week's challenge.

On the home front, we can now post the before and after for the last 3 pieces of our renovations.

This includes one washroom where we replaced an old and non functional Jacuzzi tub with the shower stall.

For the bathrooms, we chose an Art Deco look in both tiling and finishes. The tiles are a black and white mosaic very much reminiscent of that time.

The Mansard roof creates sloping walls on our second floor. This was a problem that we needed to adjust for. In this bathroom, we used the space with customized cabinetry.

For the second bathroom, we kept to the Deco theme.

Here we transformed a laundry room and some old cabinetry into a full bathroom.

Furthermore, we re-built an old hallway linking the main house to the west wing (this space was part of the old laundry room).

The country store in our old barn is also coming along. This week, the old concrete floor was torn out. and while digging we discovered a massive amount of stone.

It seems that at one time the barn had a stone floor. This is evident from the flattened faces of many of these pieces, including these two massive stones.

The larger stone is some 7 feet in length (over 2 meters). We've decided to treasure these and to somehow make use of them in the course of our renovations. 

The removal of those stones has allowed us to pour the foundation for a new floor for both the country market and the kitchen of the tea room.

Finally, we're not done on the winter squash experiments. This week was time for squash pancakes. Very similar to potato pancakes (shredded squash, eggs, flour and seasoning), we made ours using Pink Banana squash with onions, curie powder and cumin. They were great, especially with a dollop of sour cream.

We've tried a lot of different things with winter squash and I know there are hundreds of additional recipes to enjoy this great food. However, I think we will sign off on this series and urge everyone to try locally grown winter squash. They are inexpensive and a great source of Vitamin A. For a few dollars, you get a lot of a very healthy and versatile food. In our case, we have enough in our cellar to last the winter and to continue experimenting. We know this will now become one of our annual winter staples.

I will sign off this week with a few images of the old Carolinian forest. Although winter is rapidly approaching, it is still a great enchanting place where morning walks are always a pleasure.

The Widow's Walk

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Last week we reported on our finished bedrooms. This week the old Victorian manor finally started to feel like our home. The second floor landing was completed.

The effect is very much period and really nice as shown in these before and after pictures.

We chose a rather dramatic red and gold patterned carpet reminiscent of the Victorian style. We did not go so far with the walls, but we did pick up on the carpeting's colour palette. To lessen the darkness of the red, we added a "cherry rail" providing the effect of wainscoting. Of course all of the electrical wiring was changed and we were able to replace an old ceiling fan with a more suitable chandelier.

The banister was re-stained and varnished to bring out the beautiful deep red cherry wood. The downstairs entrance hall carries the same colours but we now plan a new entrance flooring. In order not to damage it in the next phase of renovations, this will be done at the end of our project. Around the same time frame, we also expect to work on the main entrance doors.

What is even more dramatic is what we were able to do with the Widow's Walk. Before I get into this, there has been some debate here about this room.

A Widow's Walk is very typical of Victorian Second Empire homes. Although it became very much an architectural embellishment, originally it was postulated that these rooms were designed to be used by women waiting for their men arriving from the sea. They would walk to these rooms so they could look at a distance. They were typically accessible from the roof.

Our Widow's Walk was definitely not accessible from the roof (and never seems to have been). In fact, the only access seemed to be from a small opening in the ceiling similar to an attic access panel.

This fact lands credence to a story we read. An elderly lady (Marjorie Page) who lived on the property as a child during the Great Depression (1920's) wrote a small article published last year in Niagara this Week and on the web site MyPelham; it was about her experiences on the property, which they fondly referred to as the Ridgeville Castle at the time (on the outskirts of a very small country town, this farm house would have certainly seemed grand).

In those days, the Widow's Walk was referred to as a bell tower. Presumably it housed a large bell which would be used to call the workers from the field. So this "Widow's Walk" may have actually been a "Bellfry" (a term our contractor has been using since the beginning).

In any case, once we saw beyond the access panel we made the rather bold decision to completely open up the ceiling below this room.   

This part of the project is finally finished and here are the results. 

This has become a very impressive space. It is now a signature architectural element for the inside of the house and it actually looks much more impressive than it does on the outside (or in photos).

Aside from insulation and the finishing of the new walls, the windows of the tower had to be completely rebuilt. The original window frames were rotted.

To finish the space we picked up on the colour palette of the second floor landing. Paneling simulating the paneling beneath the main windows was added to provide a break from the red walls and to finish the junction between the brick walls of the tower and the interior plaster walls.

We also installed electricity to the tower and now (where presumably there might have been a bell) a large coach light style chandelier hangs from the peak.

Next week, I hope to post the results for the two new bathrooms.

PS. Next year, we will be searching the house for the "hand-painted ceiling" referred to by Marjorie Page ....I fear it is long gone, but with all of our false ceilings, you never know.

Meanwhile, I still have to report on the farming front and of course we continue to clear land...seemingly a never ending process.

However with the nice weather (almost spring like this week), we do feel we have achieved some progress. I never thought we would see our Kiwi vines from across the creek and I never thought we would be able to distinguish the old trellis rows of the Kiwis. I think it will now be time to attempt a proper trellising system for some of these fruits.

Of course I cannot complete this blog without reporting on our winter squash trials.

This week, it was time for the Festival Squash. Somewhat smaller than an Acorn squash and much more colourful, this squash is easy to process.

This week's recipe experiment was Couscous stuffed squash.

For this meal, we halved the squash and seeded them. We then baked these in a 175 deg. C oven until tender.

We concocted a mixture of melted butter and brown sugar and brushed the inside of the squash.

For the stuffing we fried some carrots, garlic and celery in vegetable oil. Added cumin, pepper and salt. After a few minutes, we added chick peas (or garbanzo beans) and raisins.

Once the vegetables were tender, we added some home made vegetable stock to the mix and the recommended amount of couscous (1 1/2 volume of liquid to 1 volume of couscous). We let the whole thing simmer until the couscous had absorbed all the liquid.

The result: a delicious and hearty vegetarian meal or side dish.

Finally, for those interested in local and organic foods, please check out this video entitled Farmageddon. This highlights the plight of small American family farms today; it is truly concerning that the "land of liberty and freedom" should come to this.