bogs

If there’s a staple to the Thanksgiving meal besides turkey, it would be cranberries. How did this come to be? Because cranberries are one of only three fruits native to North America and were eaten by the Native Americans long before Europeans arrived. In New Jersey, the Lenape Indians called them pakihm and used them as “craisins,” drying them for use in soups and other mixtures. They also ground dried cranberries into a jerky-like substance called pemmican, which was good for long trips. When the Dutch arrived around 1655, they thought cranberry flowers resembled crane’s heads and dubbed them “craneberries,” which later evolved to cranberries. Unique Harvesting Today cranberries are grown primarily in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. While there are over 2,400 varieties, only a few dozen are grown commercially. With a love of aerated, acidic soils, cranberries are a perennial crop grown in man-made wetlands or bogs. This unique farming method, while a large part of the appeal of those Ocean Spray ads, also leads to a lot of misperceptions about how they are grown. “People make all sorts of assumptions,” says Brenda Conner, a fifth generation grower and owner of Pine Barrens Native Fruits in Browns Mills, NJ. “Cranberries are not aquatic; they’re a wetland plant that behaves like a desert plant.” In other words, cranberries do not actually grow in water; they grow in coarse, wet sand. Water is let into and out of the bogs depending on needs and temperatures by a damming ...