Finishing Touches

With the weather turning once again bitterly cold and snowy, this week was time to complete some finishing touches inside the manor. Now that the paintings, mirrors and all light fixtures are up, the Tucker team (our local contractor) was keen to have a photographic record of their good work. So we had two days with a pro (local photographer Esther van Geest) meticulously staging our home. I have to admit the results look better than real life....or seem to. Perhaps we have grown a little too acquainted with our surroundings.

It was time for a pro (Esther van Geest) to record the inside of the manor

We hope to use these photos with a re-write of the manor's history. This we expect to post on our website this year.

To view the latest from Ridge Berry Farm visit our new blog and site!

Although there are a few things left to do, this year we will now be concentrating on the outside of the manor, including landscaping.

Last year we took the Winter months to begin work on our barn kitchen and store. This year we have started another phase of this work: the dining veranda. The objective is to make it a little more comfortable for our patrons. In effect, we hope to provide a little bit more shelter from the elements by replacing the old blinds....while still providing an eating environment with an "outdoor" feel.

Starting work on refinishing the veranda

We are also taking the time to replace the ceiling lattice work. Although this looked clean, it was the perfect place for bird and squirrel nests, which were rather unpleasant to remove.

On the farming front, it was time to prepare for Spring....and this means ordering our seeds and plants for the new year. To begin, we had to measure our new rows. It turns out that our measuring wheel was not accurate so we have reverted to a 200 foot tape measure (we should have done this a long time ago!).

Measuring our new rows.

With row lengths recorded and visions of large new raised beds in our heads, we were keen to scan the web for this year's seeds. I thought we went a little too far last year, but I think we really went overboard this year. We now have well over 50 different varieties of herbs and vegetables on order; we will also be introducing a new berry to our offering: the Haskap. We will also be increasing our inventory of raspberries (adding Black Raspberries to our fields) as well as Black Currants.

From a vegetable point of view, it will really be fascinating to see what works out now that we also have our Growing Dome greenhouse to get things started.

On the dome front, we are now ready to commit to a final internal configuration. Our hydroponic bed concept seems to work so we ordered another 16 beds from Northern Lights and took delivery of the majority this week.

With the hydroponic beds in...it's time for wood working.

Now it's time to do a massive amount of woodworking.

We will close this week with a special event announcement: Chef Ryan Beck will be a guest Chef at Oast House in Niagara-on-the-Lake every Sunday in February. So if you want a taste of Ridge Berry Farm....while the Tea Room is closed, a good venue to taste Ryan's cooking for the next month will be at this great local micro-brewery.

Pruning Kiwis

To view the latest from Ridge Berry Farm visit our new blog and site!

With the family just recovering from the flu, the past couple of weeks have not been very productive. However, with the weather warming up, it was time to start some work outdoors.

We started by cleaning the remnants of the ice storm. In particular, it was time to clear an old willow which had fallen. It turns out this wood is harder to cut and heavier than we had anticipated. In fact, the willow's trunk is beyond the capacity of our small chain saw.

One massive willow to clean up

It turns out the best we could do was to trim the spurious branches. We now have a large bifurcated trunk sweeping over the creek.

Cleaning up the willow proved a lot more difficult than planned

From the willow, we returned to pruning our Kiwis. These have taken very well to the horizontal trellises we built last year. Evidence of this is the tight "pig tailing" of the vines on our polyamide cables.

"Pig tailing" trellised vines (with old never pruned vines in the background)

With the trellised vines, our pruning time has been brought down to 1 hour per plant. Because they are not yet trained (we are aiming for 5 nice longitudinal vines, one per cable), it is still difficult as spurious growth tends to wrap around itself.

Although neater than their old counterparts, pruning these is still a difficult process

Our polyamide cable has proven itself. It has maintained its tensile strength over the seasons and it is easy to deploy. We have however encountered one minor problem: it is also easy to cut with plain old shears....and not being careful enough, this is exactly what we did!

The result is not as dramatic as you would expect. Instead of re-stringing over a 100 feet of cable, we simply used a "splicing" tool normally reserved for metal cables.

Cut cable...no problem, just splice

With the flu, we also decided to do as much indoor work as possible. This week, this has entailed cleaning, organizing and decorating the house and our gallery for a photo shoot. We hope to use some of these photos for a "before" and "after" review of the renovations as well as on our web sites.

Working on the gallery 

We now have a really nice display of our Schneider collection

We concluded this week with the bottling of our last batch of wine for the past year (2013): an Arctic Kiwi wine.

This was our second attempt at a Kiwi wine. The first turned out quite well, but we did it using a kiwi "mash" which was a rather messy process. This latest brew used whole fruits...and the results were just as nice. No matter which way it is done it reminds me a lot of a late harvest white wine with a strong hint of pineapple.

Straining and bottling the last brew.

Closed for the Season

To view the latest from Ridge Berry Farm visit our new blog and site!

With a very wintry week as a backdrop, we've decided to close Ridge Berry Farm for the Season. With the exception of special events in the coming two months, we now expect to reopen to the public this March.

Our objective is to be open year-round. However, as new restaurant operators, we've learned a lot in the past 6 months. We also have a lot of ambitious plans many of which need prioritization. So this short closing provides us with an opportunity to regroup and prepare for a bigger and better year.

Although the operation will be closed for a short period, this blog will continue. We still have a lot of work ongoing on the property and many more local food experiments to share with our readers.

This week, like everyone in the north east, we were greatly hampered in our work by bitterly cold weather. Although not amazingly cold from a Canadian point of view, we did manage to reach -18 deg. C. With the wind, we were not very keen to work outside.

So our attention turned to the Growing Dome. Everything on this front has been working against us. First we filled our water tank (the thermal mass of the dome) in the fall. Next, we had an early winter with snow falling in mid-December. Now, we have a cold front from the arctic dropping temperatures rapidly. To further aggravate things, we have had very few sunny days.

The result is that temperatures in the dome have been dropping to below zero at times (we have on record -3 deg. C). While our tank water temperature did reach 0.

Water freezing in the hydroponic beds

What is amazing however is the significant changes in temperature as soon as the sun hits the dome. On a sunny day it will reach above 20 deg. while the average daytime difference is +10 degrees. The impact on the plants is mixed. Our large fennel plants have suffered and are wilting. Meanwhile, some of our seedlings, including lettuce, seem to be in reasonable shape (although their growth has slowed).

Seedlings still in reasonable shape

The bottom line is that we still have a lot of hope for next season, once the dome has a full summer of operation. So it's now time for us to use the winter months and quickly build up our complete system.

Part of our indoor work this week has also involved bottling one of our raspberry wines. Our first wines were dry and tart. Our new recipes have become a lot sweeter. The wine actually tastes like raspberry candy making it easy to forget that it is a full bodied wine with all of the expected alcohol content.

Part of this batch we've actually set aside for secondary fermentation to see what it will produce. In fact, we also hope to use some of this wine to create a real (not just flavoured) raspberry vinegar.

Some raspberry wine ready for secondary fermentation

We will continue to refine these recipes but we have also learned that one parameter controls our process....and we have not been controlling this parameter: temperature.

We started fermenting in the back of our barn this summer. In this environment we had no temperature control. As the weather cooled, we noticed an important slowing of the fermentation process so we moved the remaining fermentors to our house cellar. The cellar temperature however is still rather cold (particularly these past few days).

It is clear that as we progress in our process, a proper facility will require stringent temperature control. We now only have one more batch in process and that is an Arctic Kiwi wine.So for the meantime, we've decided to stop our experiments until Spring.

Given this week's weather, I will leave you this week with a picture of the dome in all its winter glory.