Goin to Town

Like many farms, we have to look for other revenue streams. We produce value added products from our cranberries and retail them at the farm and wholesale them throughout Ontario. We try to keep it simple, maintain quality, and create unique tastes. About two weeks ago we went to town to showcase our products as part of Savour Muskoka.

This initiative is designed to have Muskoka Resorts, Restaurants use local products in the dishes they produce and to "brand" Muskoka produced food products in stores and gift shops.

Often this sort of creative marketing is required to get local products in front of consumers. For those that try to buy locally... this farmer salutes you!

Spring is on the way!

We do many things in the off season. One of the cultural practices in cranberry farming is sanding. We flood the fields in early winter to make a layer of ice. This allows us to do work like ditching and sanding. We place a layer of sand on the ice in the late winter and as the ice melts it filters to the bog floor. The sand covers up weed seeds and insect eggs and perhaps most importantly allows the longer runners to set a root, thus invigorating the plant.

Above is a picture of one of the ways we sand. When the ice it thin, we tow the small sander behind the tractor and lay down the sand. We can sand about 2 acres per day with this method. With thick ice, we use tandem trucks and and a bigger tow behind sander. With this method, we can sand up to 8 acres.