Many of my favorite foods were discovered in the Americas: corn, potatoes, chocolate, vanilla and cranberries, to name a few. My favorite cranberry recipe is simple. Drop one whole, unpeeled orange, a bag of cranberries and a couple of handfuls of walnut or pecan meats into a blender. Chop it all up and pour it into a bowl. Add sugar to taste. I love it, but no one else in the family likes the orange peels. You can skip the nuts and add blueberries, strawberries, raspberries or blackberries.
Many of you are also developing a taste for this native wetland plant. Sales of craisins (dried cranberries) are increasing. Cranberries are good for you; they are low in calories and have vitamins and minerals.
In the 1960s, the Ocean Spray Growers' Cooperative began production of cranberry juice. Now, there are probably 20 flavors of cranberry mixed with other fruit juices. Only 5% of the harvest is used for fresh fruit. The rest is made into sauces, juices or craisins.
Botanically, the cranberry Vaccinium macrocarpon is in the ericaceae family. The Vaccinium genus has over 130 species, including another favorite North American native, the blueberry. These cranberry bushes are very low-growing; they usually grow less than 6 inches tall with a few 1-foot sprouts. Since the branches root into the soil upon contact, they can grow very wide, making it a good evergreen ground cover plant.
In the wild, cranberries grow in the full sun of sphagnum peat bogs. They will tolerate half sun sites. In the winter, they can be left flooded for a while, but not in the summer. Some commercial fields are left flooded in the winter to protect the plants from dry winter winds.
More than 100 varieties have been selected from the wild, mostly for more and larger fruit. Newer varieties are more tolerant of a wide variety of soil conditions. Sandy to boggy soils that do not stay flooded will work. The pH should be from 4 to 6.5. Some good commercial varieties such as Ben Lear and Stevens are available through Hartmann's Plant Company in Michigan.
The tiny evergreen leaves are less than an inch long and only a 1/8-inch wide. They are glossy green in the summer and take on a reddish cast over winter.
The small pinkish flowers are not showy and bloom in May in the south and through July in the north. They resemble the head of a crane, so the English settlers called them crane berries, but it eventually was shortened to cranberry. The flowers are self-pollinating, with bees doing much of the work. The fruit ripen in 75 to 100 days, usually in September to October.
Massachusetts and Wisconsin vie for top producer honors each year. The other three states with large commercial bogs are New Jersey, Oregon and Washington. Cranberries are native from Newfoundland to Saskatchewan, south to Minnesota, Michigan and North Carolina. They will grow in hardiness zones 3 through 6.
Over 800 million pounds are produced each year, on only about 16,000 acres of marshland. The cranberry fields have thousands of acres of supporting wetlands. These areas are filled with native plants and animals. Everything from 5-foot-tall sandhill cranes to rare bog orchids survive in the surrounding wetlands.
These wetlands also supply water for harvesting cranberries. When the crop is ripe, the field is flooded about a foot deep. Machines come through to loosen the berries. The berries float and are pushed to conveyor belts that lift them into trucks. Wet harvested berries are used for juice and sauces.
Cranberries are harvested dry by lawn mower-sized machines with comblike lifter bars that put the fruit into bags. These are sold as fresh fruit. You can tell if a cranberry is overripe by dropping it a couple of feet. If it bounces about 4 inches, it is ripe; if it does not bounce, it is overripe. I have heard that the same technique works with watermelons as well — but just don't tell your grocer where you heard this.
DIST. BY CREATORS.COM
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