Cranberry Harvest, Plymouth, Bourne, Wareham

November 25, 2020

As Thanksgiving draws near, we thought we'd take you to Plymouth for a bit of cranberry harvesting. We were called Cranberry County Magazine for a while, and this guy was our logo for about 8 years. I probably owe him a share of the profits, which- sucks to be him- would be about $7.

These shots were from Plymouth, Carver, Bourne and Wareham.

They are from prior articles. We stayed out of the bogs this year. We are not familiar with the Covid protocols for each individual farm, so we played it safe.

Cranberry thresher machine thingy

... in action!

That machine makes the berries float, and then the workers gather them up and a machine sucks them into a truck. We have all parts of that process in this article somewhere, although they are somewhat shambolic chronologically.

We got in real close for some shots, which they used to let you do before the Coronavirus came around.

Wisconsin, a much larger state physically, produces more cranberries than Massachusetts does. However, they don't have Pilgrims or Ocean Spray. When people think of cranberries, they think of Massachusetts. Long story, short... if your cranberries aren't from Massachusetts, your cranberries are wiggedy wiggedy whack.

Stephen is a hack photographer at best, but even he couldn't mess up cranberries, sun and sky. I have no doubt that he was trying for the chiaroscuro effect of light and shade, and didn't just stumble onto it because he faced the right direction.

Yup.

Even just looking at the picture, I have a desire to run in a sprint at that bog, jump, and splash a cartoon-like human form imprint into that pool of maroon. This childish desire is why my husband doesn't let me hang around when he is raking leaves.

In case you were wondering how they get the cranberries from the bog to Ocean Spray, they use the cranberry conveyor belt thingy.

From the bog...

... to the truck!

Pretty short path between the two, once they channel the berries from the non-truck side of the bog.

A good sized bog produces like a dozen truckloads of berries.

They fill it right to the rim, too. If you are driving in Plymouth County, or even Barnstable or Bristol County, and you see maroon patches on the road... one of these spilled some cranberries, and then 2000 cars drove over them and mashed them into the very fiber of the road. The exception is Duxbury, where I think like 20 years ago they paid a shoddy contractor to do some roads and they turned pinkish-maroon somehow through some miracle of science.

The shorter cranberry harvest guys have to choke up on the rake a bit, like a kid in Pony League with a bat that is too large for him. My man was working hard, though... he moved as many berries as the bigger men.

You would need a corresponding truck of vodka and another corresponding truck of sugar to make a high school gym-sized Cape Codder. You'd probably need a fertilizer plant fire to boil the sugar and the berries into a palatable juice, but 18 wheels of vodka hides a lot of culinary flaws.