The next time Pat Edmonds creates one of her blueberry cakes, she can thank the busy bees at Barrie Hill Farms.
Like folks from the area — and beyond — have been doing for almost 40 years, she was out in the fields of the operation north of Barrie this week picking baskets of the tiny fruit.
“I came with my daughters when the oldest was about 12,” she tells BarrieToday while topping up her basket. “During the last few years, I’ve come with my four grandchildren, two of whom live in Toronto. They want to come up every summer to pick blueberries.”
At one time, the 200-plus-acre farm had a very different crop, according to owner Morris Gervais, whose parents — Adrien and Evelyn — got the ball rolling way back when.
“When I was a kid growing up here, it was a tobacco farm from 1968 to ’79,” he tells BarrieToday while driving past rows and rows of blueberry bushes. “In the late ‘70s, they started growing strawberries and I guess my parents had maybe a bit of luck but also some good vision for the future that tobacco was not an industry they wanted to be in.
“So they started planting healthy fruits and vegetables, including blueberries.”
Adrien planted the first few bushes in 1979 and a bunch more in 1982.
“So we’re still harvesting those bushes today,” Gervais says. “He used to laugh and say, ‘In my farming career, I started off causing cancer and I ended up (fighting) it, because blueberries are so healthy’. So he was working on solving the cancer he may have created by selling tobacco back in the day.”
But the tobacco leaf-curing barns are long gone and now, along with 40 acres of high-bush blueberries (roughly 40,000 individual bushes), the operation offers up fresh produce of one sort or another six months of the year.
“There’s something to pick here every day from May until October,” Gervais says, adding it’s a long list.
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“So we start with asparagus, then we move on to strawberries and peas and raspberries and green and yellow beans. Then the blueberries come, and sweet corn is available for picking now. We also have fall strawberries and pretty soon we’re going to move into apples, with picking beginning at the end of August. Then we’ve also got fall raspberries, which are just about to start. And pumpkins start in September.”
One of the new crops Gervais and his staff are really excited about this year is popcorn.
“It’s a special type of corn with a special kind of starch that really pops,” he says. “It has to have the right level of dryness. If there is too much moisture in the kernel, it won’t pop.
“That will be the end of September or beginning of October and people can come and pick their own. So we’re going to have some fun with that this year.”
The farm recently endured a very wet and rainy July.
“It’s one of the rainiest I can remember,” Gervais says. “That has posed some problems with our raspberry production, but the rain has been great for our potatoes, corn pumpkins, all the vegetables. And blueberries love this rain.”
And people love those berries. Customers come from the local area, the GTA and beyond, especially for blueberries and Mother Nature has provided Barrie Hill Farms with the ideal conditions to grow them.
“In order to grow blueberries effectively, you have to have the correct soil,” Gervais says. “It has to be very acidic and well-drained. That type of soil isn’t that abundant across southern Ontario, so blueberry farms are a little more rare and a little more unique.
“We do get people coming from a little farther afield.”
Another thing the farm gets is help from is industrious insects.
“The bees are very busy in the spring. We need a lot of honey bees and we also bring in bumblebees to help pollinate each blueberry flower,” he says. “Each blueberry you see, and there’s a lot of them, required a pollination visit from a bee. A blueberry flower is shaped like a bell and wind doesn’t move the pollen around.
“So you require a bee to get up in that flower and move on to the next one. The crop is very dependent on good weather and pollination and us having the bees here ready to go.
“It’s a partnership with our local beekeeper,” Gervais adds. “We have a great population of bumblebees around the farm because we’ve been continuously introducing them over the past 20 or so years.”
Gervais says many of the visitors to the farm are creating a real family tradition.
“People who have come here as children are now bringing their children and their grand children. It’s about a day in the country, getting some fresh air and healthy food. You can’t get it any fresher than picking it off the bush yourself.”
Barrie Hill Farms is located at 2935 Barrie Hill Rd., in Springwater Township.
