For sure most of us have seen bags of large fresh cranberries in the stores around Thanksgiving. You may also have seen the Ocean Spray advertisements for cranberry juice and other cranberry products with men in waders standing in a pond with cranberries floating around them. I always had trouble imagining how one would harvest cultured cranberries with this flooding method. Last weekend I was finally enlightened thanks to a visit to the Cranberry Museum in Long Beach Washington. Why was I so long so puzzled about this? When I was little our family would regularly take to the woods for foraging for wild blueberries in the summer and for wild cranberries in the fall. These are delicious berries growing on rather small bushes on the forest floor and while the size of the berries varies – they are not even close to what cultured berries can be. Since we moved to Oregon we have taken advantage of the vast fields of cultured blueberries – bushes that are probably five to six feet tall. The berries are easy to pick because the bushes are loaded, and they are very large – up to half an inch in diameter perhaps. So based on that experience I assumed that the cultured cranberries would be grown in a very similar fashion. Imagine the volume of water it would take to flood a field with six-foot-tall bushes! Well, they are not that tall! I learned that the cultured cranberries grow almost as carpet of vines – perhaps four to six inches tall – inches not feet! They are grown in what is called bogs or marshes – specially designed and built depressions with irrigation and ultimately flooding capabilities. Unfortunately, we could not observe a harvest but the pictures on display showed a shallow flooding of just above the vines and special machines beating loose the berries that then will float on the surface. Perhaps collecting the berries in a certain spot can benefit from raising the water level further but judging the walking dikes around the bogs I would think we are talking perhaps about 18 inches or so – a far cry from my initial assumption of five to six feet!
The size and density of the cranberries is equally impressive as with the cultured blueberries. They had already a deep dark red color standing out from the green vines.
Along the way we learned also about the challenges of growing them efficiently and the research that has gone on and is still going into the field. In fact, the museum is adjacent to a research center that is supported by Washington University.