Cranberry Bog
Cranberries are a very strange fruit. They like to grow in long trailing vines in bog beds made up of sand, acidic peat moss, gravel, and clay. Natural beds of this sort are usually the result of glacial deposits, but commercial cranberry growers use ditches, uplands, wetlands, and other moist habitats to cultivate the fruit.
There are kettle bogs in Massachusetts made by glaciers that passed through about ten thousand years ago that are used for cranberry cultivation today. Some of the vines in Cape Cod are up to one hundred and fifty years old. Cranberries are also grown in New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, New York, Rhode Island, select provinces of Canada, and Chile.
Cranberries are usually harvested in the fall in one of two ways; dry or wet. We get the idea that cranberries grow floating in water from wet harvesting. The bogs they are grown in actually do not hold any standing water during the growing season, but, when harvest time comes around, the bogs are flooded with about 18 inches of water. From there, the farmers use giant reels to churn the water and break the berries free from the vines. The berries are then corralled, loaded into trucks, and shipped off. They can also be dry harvested. This requires a mechanical picker, something like a big lawnmower that goes through the bog and combs the berries off the vines.
I honestly always thought they grew floating on the surface of water in small lakes or ponds. I guess the Ocean Spray commercials lead me astray.
Sources
“Fall Is Cranberry Harvest Season | Ocean Spray.” Ocean Spray. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 May 2016. <http://www.oceanspray.com/Who-We-Are/Harvest/Cranberry.aspx>.
“How Cranberries Grow Introduction.” How Cranberries Grow Introduction. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 May 2016. <http://www.cranberries.org/cranberries/grow_intro.html>.
