One of my favorite things about Thanksgiving are cranberries. I just love these little red berries and in honor of Thanksgiving I am raising this humble fruit from red berry to a complete palette of inspiring red hues.
To pick just one color would require me to dismiss all of the many gorgeous red hues in a bowl of fresh cranberries, which is how I prefer them until just hours before the meal when I grind fresh berries with fresh oranges and a splash of lemon for a raw cranberry relish that is so good it makes my taste buds tingle just thinking about it.
My love of cranberries extends into the picturesquegrowing and harvesting. While living in Massachusetts my son and I would make a trip each fall to see the flooding of the cranberry bogs. Below is what the bogs look like before they are flooded. What you see is the top of the bushes and the bog is about three feet deep.
The process is kind of like planting bushes in the bottom of your empty swimming pool. Letting them grow all summer and then in the fall filling the pool with water and then getting in and shaking the bushes until all of the berries fall off and float to the top.
In the bogs rather than shaking the bushes they actually use this machine that makes sure the bushes let loose of the cranberries and that they all float on top for harvest.
You’ve never really tasted a cranberry until you’ve scooped a few out of the water of the bog and popped them into your mouth. The difference between fresh-off-the-bush and fresh in the grocery store is that these are tangy but not sour or bitter in the least.
This is an ariel photo of one of the bogs as they float the cranberries to one spot to be vacuumed up into a truck. I love the hearts they made for the photo. It seems Decas Cranberry Products understands my love affair with this berry.
Here are the fresh berries waiting to be processed. Even in the crates they look just gorgeous.
The top picture is from a delightful blog post about stealing into a bog with some friends to harvest cranberries on Gillian Coldsnow’s blog
The remaining pictures are all from the Decas Cranberry Products site. They obviously have their own love affair with the glorious cranberry because of all the pictures I have looked at theirs seemed to share my romanticized view of the harvest.
