It's Elderberry Season

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Technically it's Peach season in Niagara. With the annual Peach Festival now over, the Tea Room did serve the obligatory Peach pies and tarts. However, it is also the season for Elderberries. Although not as popular as in Europe, these wonderful berries grow well and grow wild in this region.

Our own patches of Elderberry plants have been very productive this year. The branches have been drooping under the weight of the berries. So it's now time to make Elderberry preserves, pies and whatever else comes to mind.

The Elderberry branches are drooping under the weight of their berries.

The best thing about these plants is that they pretty much grow "wild" or in a permaculture state. The only thing we need to do to care for them is to take down the invasive bushes, brushes and saplings like our "nemesis" the dreaded Manitoba Maple or Boxelder.

Elsewhere on the farm, we are finally making some headway in generating organic Apples. This has proven to be a tough thing to achieve. Although we're not quite there yet, this year's Apples are starting to look a lot better. The key so far is a combination of an organic soap spray and protectve "socks" (as we've reported on last year).

A couple of the better Apples produced to date.

In fact this year, we've decided we can actually use our Apples to pursue our cider experiments. Something we'll be reporting on as we progress.

Crushing and juicing our Apples to produce our first Ridge Berry hard cider.

Well close this week with another attempt at doing something different. This time in the Tea Room.

We have been hosting quite a few special occasions in our small restaurant. Mostly "showers" of one kind or another. Typicaly we work on a "spread" based on our High Tea menu.

A recent Tea Room High Tea "spread" for a shower. 

These occasions always seem to call for something different and  special. Since we have now mastered the "Petit Chou" or profiterole. We've decded to "kick it up" a notch by working on a "Piece Montee". This is typical of the wedding, anniversary, baptism or celebratory cakes served on special occasions in France.

We've been working on some "prototypes" and we expect that by the end of the month, we'll be able to post a picture of our first piece montee for a very special occasion.....so please "stay tuned". Certainly this is something that very few offer in Niagara.

Prototyping or first "piece montee".....we have the blistered fingers to prove it!

Downton Abbey at the Farm

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We're all fans of the show. So, as insinuated a few weeks back, we've decided to host our own Downton Abbey themed event on September 12th. The event will entail games, period cars and a very special High Tea. Seating is limited to 40 and we are already half booked. So if anyone out there is interested please call Carol at (289) 897-8943.

Tickets are 45$; this includes prizes, food and drinks. Period costumes are very highly encouraged.

Meanwhile, we've finally survived the busiest month of the year (July). This year, July was a record month for us and of course this included a few record days. The bottom line is that some days we literally ended up creating High Tea production lines.

A High Tea assembly line...

This level of activity at the Tea Room has kept us from accomplishing much on the farm. On the plus side, all of our Berry crops have been put to good use.

Nevertheless, we managed to make some progress on the re-installation of our Growing Dome water tank. Hopefully, we can get our new system configuration up and running later this Fall.

Wth the water tank lowered into the ground a couple of feet, we're now ready to rebuild our system.

We'll close this week with the Chinese mystery seed we planted earlier this Spring. We've had no one identify the plant from earlier pictures on this blog and it remained a mystery until a few days ago.

Now, thanks to a recent tour group, where one Chinese visitor was seemingly a "green thumb", we finally have a positive identification.

In broken English, he told us that this was a prized vegetable, the stems are hollow, and it is easy to propagate via cuttings. Although he gave us a Chinese name for the plant, it was impossible for us to spell it out.

However, his hints and the fact that the leaves are narrow and arrow-shaped lead us to the Kang Kong  (ipomoea aquatica) or Chinese water spinach. This is a semi-aquatic tropical plant whose leaves and tender shoots are used in various Asian dishes.

A new vegetable discovery: Chinese Water Spinach

It turns out that this plant might just be perfect for our Aquaponic set up!