Let Travel, Marketing, Gardening and Food Touch At Your Table With A Trip To Brambleberry Farm. It's Stewed to Perfection.

This is a bit of history in the making. Brambleberry farm is the first location that @knarly327 and I went with our new Steemit car magnet. I was especially excited to officially take my personal Steemit.com advertising initiative on the road.

 In full marketing mode, I wore a little t-shirt that says: "Why Don't You Blog About It" and off we went.

  

Brambleberry Farm is located just outside of the small village of Wooler, Ontario Canada. In Canada we have a form of travel known as agri-tourism. There are marketing initiatives funded by the government at the provincial level which promote traveling to the farms whose owners want to open their doors to the general public and sell their produce right at the farm. Brambleberry Farm is one of these participating farms. There, you are invited to "pick your own" produce or you can buy their produce already harvested. All the produce is sold by weight. There are different prices per variety of berry, meaning that the strawberries are a set price per weight and blueberries have a set price per weight. All berries "picked by you" have a lower price per weight than those already harvested. This encourages and rewards people for getting outside and harvesting their own food. It definitely strengthens our relationship with the food we consume because you learn where your food comes from and what's involved in producing it. Let's go shall we?

  

The farm itself is owned by a wonderful lady named Kerry Copestake. 

Brambleberry Farm sits on 40 acres and grows strawberries, raspberries, cherries, blueberries currants and rhubarb.

The rhubarb that I am holding (the long red-green stalks in my right hand) is a special variety called "German Red". It is prized for it's tangy, pucker-producing flavour, which is wonderful when used as a filling or topping on desserts.

Kerry told me that she acquired the root structure for this particular variety of rhubarb from an elderly couple who operated a fruit and vegetable farm in Nova Scotia, Canada. (That's approximately 1500 kms away from Kerry's farm.) Before they retired from farming, they asked Kerry if she would like this particular plant genetics and she jumped at the chance. I am glad that she did because this rhubarb is fantastic! Rhubarb is actually considered a herbaceous perennial, but when it's stewed and combined with honey or sugar it is treated like a fruit because of its taste. Rhubarb's leaves are poisonous but the stalks are not. Although rhubarb is not related to celery, the stalks are very similar and generally rhubarb harvesting happens from mid-May to mid-June, in my region.

Here's a picture of it, growing in my own garden. (I just planted it this Spring, so I won't be harvesting my own until next year.):

   

Rhubarb can be an invasive plant species in a garden so I will be staying on top of this particular planting. If left unattended a patch of rhubarb will keep growing and it's not uncommon to see large sections (8 ft long by 4 ft wide) growing in Canadian gardens. Rhubarb makes an excellent addition to jams made with berries and it also freezes very well for winter storage if you have freezer space available.

At Brambleberry Farm the strawberry harvest is now in full swing. It started on June 15th this year and is expected to wrap up around July 10th. At approximately 3 weeks, the fresh strawberry season is relatively short. Raspberries are expected to be ready for picking in mid-July and blueberries are expected to be harvest-ready at the end of July.

Here I am in the strawberry section. Behind me are rows and rows of other strawberries and strawberry pickers, anxious to stock up on these beautiful berries, which are absolutely perfect this year.

@knarly327 took these videos and uploaded them to his YouTube channel (Scrap Fe) on June 24th, 2017.

For more information about Brambleberry Farm, you can visit their website at  http://www.brambleberryfarm.ca/

  

The locally grown strawberries and rhubarb are second to none this year.

I welcome your comments and I invite you to follow me on my journey.

I'm enjoying the fresh fruits of summer with a Brambleberry flair.

~ Rebecca Ryan