Lobster eggs!

The past two weeks I have not had many words put onto paper, because I've been focused on our harvest.

My family has been in the cranberry business for nearly 30 years. We started by inheriting a couple of cranberry bogs - that's the name for the land area where the cranberries are grown. The bog is lower than the surrounding land and encircled by a moat-like ditch to make flooding the bogs with water possible at harvest time.

We use a reel to pick the berries. Cranberries have little air pockets in them, so when the reel scrapes the berry from the vine, the berry floats. What you see in this photo is floating cranberries being pushed toward the pump that will put them onto the truck for transport.

We sometimes have visitors during harvest, especially if we are picking a bog easily seen from the road. One year, a tourist who had never seen a cranberry harvest asked if we were harvesting lobster eggs! (I don't think he ate much seafood, either!) We all got a good chuckle at that, and it has become a favorite story for my husband to tell new visitors.

This is the reel, which has a hydraulic beater bar/reel in the front. As the bog is being flooded with enough water to make the vines and berries start to float, the reel is driven onto the bog and around in circles to knock the berries from the vines. 

Once more water has been added to the bog so that the berries float above the vines, we can start the job of getting the berries onto the truck to transport to the processing plant. We don waders to wear into the water and grab our handy "pushers" to help direct the berries toward the suction box.

To keep the berries from floating whichever way the wind would blow, we use corral boards that hook together with hinges. Some companies have "cranbarrier" which is more flexible and lighter, to corral the berries, but we use what we have. 

Berries are loaded onto the truck through a suction hose that gets staked to the bog just under the surface of the water/berries. The water and berries go up to the wash box at the top, where the berries are diverted to the waiting truck and the water and leaves and other debris go out another pipe into the trash truck, which separates the debris from the water. Water is directed back to the bog, and the debris - leaves that were knocked off, grasses, etc., is hauled to a pile and dumped out.

At the top of the wash box is this spray bar, which sprays water onto the berries and debris coming out of the bog. This causes the debris to fall through the metal rods below, and the berries to bounce down into the truck to be taken to the plant for processing.

The way our harvest is handled is similar to my idea of a Barn Raising, in that some of our friends come to help and we feed them good, hot food and try to have a few laughs. When the water is hard to come by, as it was this year, or it's very cold, or raining or snowing, it can make the work a lot easier when you can have a few laughs along the way. We are so grateful for the help of our friends! 

This picture is of myself and my husband, smiling because the sun finally came out, the crop is almost in, and I bought a new selfie-stick and made him stand with me to try it out. 😉