2020 Life Logs, Day 292: More Cranberry Harvesting
Date: Monday, October 19, 2020
Weather: Sunny and Beautiful; High 61, Low 47 Degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, Falmouth, MA
Today’s focus was all about more cranberry harvesting—by dry harvesting by hand and wet harvesting done commercially. One of the wonderful things about living on Cape Cod is that come mid-October, we get to see the commercial harvesting of the cranberry bogs. And it is a spectacularly colorful process to watch. Here in East Falmouth, cranberry bogs seem to be just around every turn in the road. I spent the early afternoon returning to the community bog we visited yesterday and I picked more cranberries the way the Native Americans would have done it. Hard on the back and hard on the knees, but so satisfying. Commercial bogs are flooded for the harvest; natural bogs are not. Machinery is used to harvest the commercial bogs; your fingers do the picking in the natural bogs. It takes about 45 minutes of hand picking for me to fill one of those plastic containers that mixed greens come in at the grocery store. It takes most of the day to fill a huge cargo container in a commercial bog. There’s no doubt that the commercial harvest is more efficient but harvesting by hand for the first time has been a wonderful experience for me.
Today I discovered the commercial harvesting operation in the bogs near where the Goldstones used to live as I drove to the community bog to hand pick today. So, when I picked Ollie up after school, we drove by the bogs to watch the operation. The first time Ollie and I ever watched this harvesting operation was on October 9. 2013 when Ollie was one. Back then, I was taking the photos. Today I gave the camera to Ollie and let him document the harvest. The experience brought back those memories from the fall of 2013. If you are interested in details about the commercial harvest, you can read my log entry from that day copied below.
Day 340, Year 8: Cranberry Harvest in the Bogs
Date: Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Weather: Still Sunny and Cool
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Cranberry bogs are like beaches on Cape Cod. You don’t have to travel far to find one. It all started about 18,000 years ago during when the glaciers in this area melted leaving a sandy substrate. It is almost as if all of Cape Cod is one big sand bar with lots of low spots that have developed as ponds. Heather and Jed live one block away from Mill Pond and the adjacent low spot that has been developed into a cranberry bog. Cranberries are an evergreen dwarf shrub that can be dry harvested (hand-picked) or wet-picked with machinery as they are in ‘our’ bogs. And today was harvesting day. We didn’t know this, but due to a wreck on the main road, Jed and Jonah had to take the back road to get to Woods Hole. This took them by the bog and all of the activity. Jed stopped and called home to give us the heads up, so Heather, Ollie, and I walked down to check it out. Heather, Jed, Sam, and Jonah have seen this before, but not Ollie and me. Heather had to leave to go to an appointment, so with Ollie in his stroller, we spent the next hour watching the process. The bogs are flooded with water, covering the plants with about 8 inches of water. Then water reel harvesters run through the bogs, removing the cranberries from the vines. The cranberries float to the surface and are gathered inside a floating plastic ring that can be moved through the water. The corralled cranberries are moved near the edge of the bog where big trucks can literally suck the cranberries from the water.
20 Happy Ollie 1
After an hour of watching, Ollie was getting cold, so we headed home. Heather was not back yet, so we played and had just the best time. Ollie is so much fun to be around. He has this deep belly laugh that is absolutely contagious. So, we played and laughed until momma got home.
