Extreme heat, rain blamed for canceling the popular Strawberry Festival

Barrie Hill Farms’ popular Strawberry Festival, which takes place every Canada Day weekend, has been cancelled.

Morris Gervais, who owns and operates the 200-plus acre farm – located just minutes outside of Barrie – said the combination of recent weather events made the farm unable to host the event.

“The season started very nicely. It was a beautiful harvest and a beautiful picking,” he said Barrie Today, adding that the season came early, which probably meant people weren’t ready to go out and pick yet. “When school isn’t out, people don’t think about strawberry picking as much.”

Gervais says the extreme heat that lasted for several days caused all the strawberries in the field to ripen faster than normal.

“We couldn’t pick them fast enough because it was so hot and people weren’t coming to pick either. Then it started raining and raining and raining,” he said. “The rain turned everything to mush.”

“Mother Nature is a tough business partner,” added Gervais.

He says his parents started picking strawberries in 1977, and there’s never been a year when they didn’t have strawberries to pick on July 1st.

“This would be the first year. It was years…it was a late strawberry season. The first day of the season was July 1st. I almost missed it that year.”

Although the festival itself has been cancelled, Gervais says the strawberry season is far from over.

“We still have a lot of strawberries coming in. We have a later variety of summer strawberries coming up and they are good but they are only green. They are not ready,” he said. “Just this little window, when we need it most, we don’t have strawberries.”

Gervais says it’s certainly disappointing to have to cancel the festival, which usually sees hundreds of people out each day over the long weekend, but he’s happy that vendors who were supposed to be on site this weekend were able to “pivots fast” and will now be set up at Bradford Greenhouses.

“We encourage people who were coming to visit us to visit the market at Bradford Greenhouse and then come here,” he said. “We’re going to try to keep a few strawberries on the shelf here all weekend, but I don’t know if we’ll make it.

“There’s just not enough strawberries out there to have thousands of people come every day all weekend,” Gervais added. “We want it to be an enjoyable experience and we just haven’t been able to provide an enjoyable experience with the fields we have. “

Although the festival has been canceled, the farm market will still be open for shopping and the silo will be open for guests to enjoy frozen yogurt and strawberry waffles.

Gervais expects the next crop of strawberries to be ripe for picking in about a week.