Too much heat and too much rain is not a good thing.
Pick-your-own fields are temporarily closed at Barrie Hill Farms in Springwater Township.
"Early in the strawberry season, we had an unseasonably long stretch of warmer weather in the mid 30s and that caused all of our early varieties to ripen really, really quickly, and so quickly we couldn't harvest them," explains Morris Gervais, farmer and owner of Barrie Hill Farms. "Then it cooled down a bit, but the rain has been excessive and now they're all really soft, and we've had mould."
Gervais says they don't have any marketable berries left in their field.
However, not all is lost. He tells Barrie 360 that their later season variety will be starting sometime next week.
"We just have a little gap in the season."
The Barrie Hill Farms Strawberry Festival scheduled for Saturday, June 29 to Canada Day has been cancelled.
"The fun of coming out to the farm is going and picking your own, and if there's no good strawberry picking, we really didn't feel that it was a whole lot to celebrate," says Gervais.
He explains there is a limited supply of strawberries already picked.
The silver lining, says Gervais, is the blueberries have loved all the rain, and "they're sizing up really nice and beautifully" and will be ready in a couple of weeks.
The farm market remains open with a variety of Ontario produce.
