Inspired by a recipe in The Seasonal Baker, this yummy coffee cake has won rave reviews to whoever has tried it. It’s sort of like a banana cake, except with strawberries!
We know that local strawberries were always in high demand, and so we began with a few acres of strawberries grown in Sumas Prairie. They’re a challenging crop to grow in the rainy Fraser Valley so we started researching practices that would help protect the crop from the rain and extend the growing season.
Lepp Farms was honoured to receive a grant from Abbotsford Community Foundation to be used towards an innovative agriculture practice. This grant was the motivation we needed to invest in an exciting new project at Lepp Farms, the strawberry tunnels.
These Strawberry Tunnels allow us to:
1) Increase agricultural productivity. Strawberries, being a soft fruit, don’t do well in the rainy weather that the Fraser Valley so often experiences. Sheltering them inside of our strawberry tunnels means that we have less food waste from damaged fruit and significantly decreases the need for other interventions.
2) Increase our farms’ capacity since tractors don’t need to get through the rows as they would in a field, we’re able to plant the rows in our strawberry tunnels closer together, getting more fruit out of the same footprint.
3) Extend the strawberry season by providing shelter so that you can enjoy locally grown, Lepp Farm strawberries for a much longer season! This means an earlier start to the season in years to come, and we expect that we will be harvesting through to Thanksgiving.
4) Raise the berries off of the ground, making it significantly easier for our farm team to pick the berries for the market.
5) Keep the bees since it warms up inside of the tunnels quicker than it does outside, bees don’t come to the tunnels to pollinate as early as the fruit starts flowering. That’s why the tunnels have their very own bees who live there.
We often get questions about whether we spray our strawberries. While our first choice is to always use biological methods, we do have to spray our berries sometimes.
To celebrate Strawberry Season, here are some of our favorite ways to enjoy our strawberries!
