Don Genova's Blog

As we get later into the harvest season we may think about tree fruits like apples, hardy vegetables like pumpkins and potatoes and of course, grapes, many of which are turned into wine in British Columbia.  There is one other product to consider, a very sweet, natural product that also gets turned into an alcoholic beverage: Honey. At Tugwell Creek Honey Farm and Meadery just outside of Sooke on Southwest Vancouver Island you can tour the facilities used for extracting honey and fermenting mead. Beekeeper and meadmaker Bob Liptrot is happy to talk about what goes on there when beehives are brought in for processing in late summer and early fall.

Every hive contains a series of frames that hold honeycombs full of honey. Bob can harvest the comb and sell it in small packages, or he lifts the hives close to the ceiling of his extraction building and cracks them open there, close to the extractor. He puts up to 20 frames inside this extractor which spins around and around with centrifugal energy. "The honey is driven to the sides of the extractor and drips down to the sump, where the wax floats on top and the honey falls to the bottom.  Then I can filter it for packing in small jars for sale, or divert it to our fermenting tanks for making mead."

One spin of a fully loaded extractor can yield about 30 to 40 kilograms of honey at a time.  Each batch of honey can take on the characteristics of the kinds of flowers the bees are feeding on.  The hives are taken out from the farm to and placed in areas up to 25 or 30 kilometres away where Bob can find high concentrations of blackberry, salal or fireweed plants, for example.

Bob Liptrot was almost born into beekeeping. Well, he did get a few years of being a kid before he started learning about bees and honey when he was six years old in East Vancouver. "Yeah, I was sort of conscripted child labour," he laughs.  "When I was in grade school, I used to walk back and forth to school past a neighbour who was a beekeeper.  He was an old Scotsman who knew the value of free help, so he would get me to help him and if I was lucky he would give me a piece of honeycomb to eat.  I was scraping hives, painting them, getting them ready for the next season, extracting honey, filling jars.  The only thing I couldn't do because I was so small was lift the 30 or 40 kilo hives off their bases!"

Bob really ‘got the bug’ so to speak, and embarked on a career as an entomologist, a bug scientist, and always kept bees as a hobby, until he and his wife decided to move to Vancouver Island to set up the farm at Tugwell Creek.

Fermented honey makes mead, and it was a natural progression for Bob Liptrot to start experimenting with mead having all that honey around, and he’s been very successful in developing a very nice line of meads, just as a winemaker develops different products from his grapes. The recipe for one, the Wassail Gold, goes back to the mid-1500’s.  In addition to the honey there are six different spices mixed in…the recipe was created by the Dutch East India Company when it was trying to promote the use of spices in Europe, and at the time only the aristocracy could afford it.

The honey industry on Vancouver Island took a real hit this past winter…85 percent of the bee colonies on Vancouver Island were wiped out last winter, at Tugwell they lost about 60 percent of their bees.  That left beekeepers scrambling to replace the bees with a safe alternative, many of them imported packages of bees from New Zealand using a bee supplier in Nanaimo, and another major honey producer on the Island petitioned the provincial government to lift a moratorium on hive imports to Vancouver Island.  That move has created a good deal of controversy. If you want to read more, check out this story in the Globe and Mail, the Island Bees website, and this story on A, a Victoria TV station.  For more info on Tugwell Creek products and their availability, visit their homepage.

You probably don’t want to hear this because you’re already wondering where September went, but Thanksgiving is just around the corner!  And with every turkey dinner there is no doubt a pot of something cranberry on the table. Most of our cranberries come from farms in BC’s Lower Mainland or even the eastern United States, but there is a cranberry farm right here on Vancouver Island busy pumping out fresh and processed cranberries.

From a distance Yellow Point Cranberries near Ladysmith just looks like a flat, green field. The plants are not very tall. But at this time of year when you walk right into the field you look down and you see all these red berries hidden within the little bushes, and the foliage starts to turn to a cranberry colour as well. 

BC's huge cranberry farms are found in places like Richmond and Delta, but Yellow Point Cranberry Farm owner Grant Keefer says he and his wife started this smaller farm on Vancouver Island because of his childhood. "Cranberry farming is in my blood, my parents operate a larger piece of farmland in the Fraser River delta, and when we moved to Vancouver Island about 8 years ago we found a piece of land that was perfect for cranberry farming, so we did what just comes naturally to me."
But there is much more to the farm than the fields of cranberries.  The Keefers produce about 20 different cranberry products in a commercial kitchen on the farm they sell in their cute little retail shop called the Cranberry Cottage. The cranberry salsa, cranberry horseradish jelly, and cranberry amaretto peach butter are all very tasty, and they even sell a little bottle filled with dried cranberries, sugar chunks and other flavourings to which you add your own liquor, like vodka, to make your own cranberry liqueur.

Right now you can do a self-guided tour to the demonstration field Grant built, poke your head into the kitchen, stand outside the cleaning and packaging line and watch some processing and of course finish up in the gift shop.

The ‘dry harvesting’ takes place first at the farm. They use a motorized ‘comb’ device that plucks the berries off the bushes and keeps them in pretty good shape, and most of that fruit is sold as fresh cranberries.  Later in October Grant will flood the fields, go through them with motorized beaters that knock the berries off, then raise the water level even further so that the berries float to the top of the water, then they get boomed to one end and pumped into containers that are sent to the Ocean Spray processing plant to be turned into juice or sweetened, dried cranberries.

If you can't get out to Yellow Point, the good news is that they do offer mail order of their products, and eventually they want to have them available in other retail locations up and down the island.  They also do a few farmers' markets up and down island selling fresh cranberries for Thanksgiving.  He notes that they want to be careful with expansion. "We don't want to get too big," he says. "We just want people to be able to come out and visit the farm, learn about cranberries and of course try some of our fabulous cranberry products."

You should also check out the website for the Cedar-Yellow Point Artisan Association for news of their Christmas tour and other great attractions like McNab's Corn Maze.