What a great country we have! And strawberries to celebrate Canada Day is who we are. Just like vacant streets when the gold medal hockey game is on!

Join us this weekend to celebrate and be thankful for Canada. We have lots of berries and lots of fun down on the farm.

Today’s Berry Forecast: Slightly awesome with a chance of fantastic. Lots of straw, no mud. 100% chance of sweetness. 100% chance of juiciness. Open 8 am – 8 pm.

It’s always an exciting day at the farm. Many of our students are starting their summer job for the first day. The wagons are freshly painted. The tires have been checked (hopefully no flats) – but we have spares ready to go!

But more importantly the berries look great and the weather forecast is wonderful.

We hope you can make it out to pick some berries with us this season!

Farmer Morris

Fresh peas in the market this morning and boy are they sweeeeet!

The long wait is over. The summer solstice is June 21 at 6:51 a.m. But everyone knows the real start of summer is when the strawberry fields are open for picking at Barrie Hill Farms! This year that’s Monday June 23 at 8:00 a.m.

So cancel your golf game. Switch your work shift (because calling in sick wouldn’t be right). Gather up your picking baskets, hat and sunscreen and head on out to the farm!

The fun begins Monday and the season will last until mid July.

We have the first berries of the season in the market today! These are our day neutral (fall) berries that you loved so much last year. They ripen a little earlier than the June berries. We expect to have a limited supply of ready picked berries in the market over the next few days and PYO strawberries will begin approximately June 26.

The crop is coming along really nicely…..but is it ever dry! We are irrigating the berries daily. Fortunately we have sub-surface drip irrigation, so we can be very efficient with our water use. No water goes to waste, because we apply it right at the root zone. There is no water lost to evaporation while irrigating, and any weed seedlings at the surface struggle to germinate in such dry conditions.  The leaves and berries stay dry, so there is less disease pressure, and fewer, if any, fungicides required. Lots of sunshine will mean very sweeeeet berries!

Right now it looks like strawberry picking will begin during the last week of June. Stay tuned. We’ll keep you posted.

The blueberry fields smell great right now. The bushes are full of flowers that with the help of lots of honeybees, will turn into plum juicy blueberries by the end of July and early August.