Day 86: A Bog Blog

Our last full day in Massachusetts, and it was a rainy one. We took the kids to the new Winnie the Pooh movie and then visited a cranberry bog, one which happens to be in the Ocean Spray co-op. We're in the heart of cranberry country, and this particular bog has been active since 1890. Prior to that, the land was used to grow flax, and thus the farm's name: Flax Pond Farm. Jack and Dot Angley run the place on their own for most of the year. But in the next few weeks, they'll have at least 12 people working to bring in their harvest, which runs mid-September to late October. Their 34-acre operation is what's called a dry bog; six people drive the picking machines (they look like commercial lawnmowers) and five more work as "muscle men," collecting the bags of cranberries from the drivers and depositing them in huge bins stacked throughout the bog. A helicopter then swoops in and collects bins stacked three high and delivers them to a nearby processor. The helicopter costs $14 per lift. The cranberries from the Angleys' bog is used for Ocean Spray's bags of whole cranberries found in the produce department. Most growers use the water harvest method, in which bogs are flooded and the vines are gently churned, allowing the cranberries to separate from the plant and float to the surface. They're corralled with lines, and workers feed them into elevators and then trucks.

A cranberry separator from the farm's earliest days is still in working order, and Dot turned it on for us. The science behind it is pretty simple: the separator essentially takes the cranberries up an elevator and then drops them through a series of shoots. Berries that are "good" are those that bounce off an angled board and into the bins. The gears, conveyor belts and chains were mesmerizing to watch; we thought of our engineer-minded niece, McKenna, and how much she would enjoy all of the separator's moving parts.

Dot runs a gift shop out of an 1890's building on the farm. The walls are a gallery of antique cranberry-bin labels. The charm of the entire place is extraordinary, and we felt so glad of the chance to experience this local industry on such a personal level. Dot had us sample many goodies, juices and condiments made from cranberries...and her sales strategy worked beautifully!