Closed for the Season

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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.