Say Bog Blog 5x Fast
Last Sunday my organization led a tour to Paradise Hill Farm, a traditional cranberry and blueberry farm in the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. It was absolutely beautiful! And so cool to see the old-fashioned machine that sorted the cranberries. The farmer told us that when she was young, she ate cranberries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I wish I knew that many cranberry recipes! Cranberries are delightfully tart, sometimes overwhelmingly sour, sometimes tinged with sweetness – when you eat them plain – but are always delicious in sauces. Her family has been farming cranberries for over 90 years – they are one of the only independent cranberry farms left that have not been taken over by Ocean Spray (I think).
So, Cranberries don’t grow underwater – even though they are always seen underwater in the Ocean Spray juice commercials. But the bogs – which were dynamyted out almost a hundred years ago (now they laser out bogs for the cranberries to grow in) – are flooded when it is time to pick them.
Check out the pictures!
Above: cranberries growing underwater!
A guy with a threshing machine to pick the cranberries.
See how the cranberries float to the top after he goes through with the machine?
Me by the cranberry bog!
mmmm cranberries!
Then they are packed into crates like this.
Raking the cranberries into the machine.
me catching cranberries as they come out of the machine.
cranberries falling out of the machine into a wooden packing crate.
and FINALLY they are packed into these blue plastic containers … in which they come to our farmstand!
