Ridge Berry Farm: We're Back!

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After what has been a 3 months "hiatus", we're back on line.

The reason for our lack of postings is manifold, but primarily it is due to the recent Tea Room success. The month of June saw record attendance, and the month of July beat that record. And things did not let up in August or September! This has meant "all hands on deck" for the family. As a result our farm activities have taken a "back seat" to our restaurant operation.

Also a major desktop failure/catastrophe didn't help.

In any case, we're back with the blog and will likely be publishing now once a month....and this entry gives us a great opportunity to wish everyone a great Thanksgiving weekend.

On the farm, the major lack of rain this summer has not helped. Our Strawberries ended early, and a large portion of our Raspberries dehydrated on the canes before we were able to get to them.

All was not lost however. The Black Currant crop was amazing and so were the Blackberries. Last year we should remind everyone we had no Blackberries and no Kiwi berries. This year was different and we are slowly awaiting our last crop....the little Kiwis!

The Kiwis are looking great this year

For this blog entry, we thought we would cover our Tomato experience this year.

We were rather proud to grow our seedlings from our own seeds for the first time.

However we were a bit late in planting and when we transplanted the seedlings to the raised beds a catastrophe occurred. Something was munching on the small plants. This had never happened before.

Something was eating our Tomato plants

The culprit: rabbits.

They effectively took down more than half of our Tomato plants. Not having identified the location of our four varieties, we became rather concerned that one of them would have been totally lost.

The nasty culprits caught on camera

Mother nature however has a way to compensate. A few days later it became apparent that some Tomatoes had "self seeded" from some fruits we had left rotting on the vines.

New seedlings, a gift from Mother Nature, grew all around our surviving transplants

The result: all varieties were salvaged and we ended up with more Tomato plants than originally anticipated. The heirloom Italian canning Tomatoes (Ropreco) ripened early and eventually we recovered our "monster" European Tomatoes (Cuaustrale and Marizol) and even our Chinese "black" tomoatoes.