High on the Bog

          New England attracts its visitors with all sorts of charms—historic architecture, spectacular foliage, and beautiful beaches are among the classics. But for the cranberry, it was the bogs that sealed the deal.  This humble member of the heather family moved in after the glaciers retreated, their icy remnants forming kettle holes--clay-lined, water-filled depressions that slowly filled with decaying organic matter, leaving an acidic brew that the new arrival found irresistible.

In its natural state, the cranberry wants only to hang out on the squishy edge of a nice protected bog in the woods, sheltered from cold winds and blazing sun, cozied up with its friends the sphagnum mosses and bog-mat liverworts. That’s where the Native Americans found the deep red berries, using them medicinally, for dye, or grinding them up for a key ingredient--along with meat and fat—in pemmican, the original energy bar.

Scholars are fairly sure that cranberries were on the tables at the first Thanksgiving in 1621, almost certainly fresh and without sweetening.  Plymouth, Massachusetts, was and remains in the heart of New England cranberry country, though Cape Cod can claim the first cultivated fruit, basically the result of an accident.  In 1816, Captain Henry Hall cleared brush from a plot of his land near Dennis, where cranberries grew naturally. Sand from nearby blew in and covered the low-lying vines, but instead of smothering the plants, Hall noticed that they grew back with vigor, producing far more berries than he’d seen before. No longer content to let sleepy bogs lie, Hall and his imitators were soon perfecting the backbreaking practice of shaping their own cranberry farms, layering sand on top of water-logged peat until the raised beds produced yields that supported a new business—one invented right here in New England. By the 1820s, intrepid Yankees were shipping cranberries to Europe for sale.

Another first was recorded around 1843 by a Cape Cod grower named Eli Howes, who discovered a variety that still bears his name. It marked the beginning of one of the most recent domestications of a wild fruit. Although there are as many as 100 varieties now, three make up a near-totality grown in New England:  Howes, which are prized for their long storage life; Stevens, a hybrid bred for high yield and disease resistance; and Early Blacks, so-called because they can be harvested earlier than the other types, before the first frost. 

Nowadays, New England is eclipsed in sheer bog-power by Wisconsin, which provides more than half of the country’s berries. Still, Massachusetts hangs in at number two, growing about a quarter of last year’s crop, worth about $82 million. As of 2019, one Bay Stater who is carrying on the tradition is Mark Herndon, who maintains nine bogs in Kingston. Since 1980, he and his family have wrested these board-flat, well-ditched, and highly productive fields from a former pine and mixed hardwood forest, using a bulldozer to remove root balls, a grader to level the planting areas, and an excavator to dig irrigation ponds. With sprayer heads spread across the fields, the plants--which form a dense mat by sending out runners that sprout upright fruit-bearing stems--are assured of sufficient water during the growing season. Circling and in some cases bisecting the bogs are ditches, there to drain the beds, as the shallow roots will rot if left sopping wet.

In a nearby shed, three diesel pumps stand ready to flood the bogs, but only for short periods and specific purposes. In the spring, drowning the fields for a week or two suppresses fungus and weeds. In the winter, flooding allows ice to protect the plants from drying winds and bitter cold. And in the fall, when the tourists take their pictures, the bogs that will be wet-harvested get covered to a depth of up to 18 inches the night before the arrival of the eggbeater, as the balloon-tired harvesting machine is called. It’s driven around the bog, the rotating cages on front giving each stem a good linear swipe to dislodge the berries, which then bob to the surface to be gathered in floating booms.  Herndon’s eggbeater, like all eggbeaters, is a Goldbergian marvel of homespun engineering. “In this business,” he says, “you have to be a welder, a mechanic, and troubleshooter. No one mass-produces these things.”

He also has three Fuford dry pickers, which, at around $10,000 each, are one of the few manufactured items in his equipment collection. Invented in 1956 by a picker who was tired of stooping over with a handheld scoop, these self-propelled machines have a row of tines that comb the berries from the plants, carrying them up a conveyor and into a bag. Dry-picked berries, unblemished, resplendently red, and about five percent of the overall harvest, come to market as fresh whole fruit. The same kind of sore back was undoubtedly behind the idea of wet harvesting, which has only been around since the 1960s. Wet-harvested berries are processed into juice, juice concentrate, sauce, and jelly.

Unlike a typical agricultural field, a cranberry bog is not plowed. Every three or four years, however, it gets sanded, just like in Captain Hall’s day, though another Goldbergian machine takes the backbreak out of the process. If the winter’s cold enough, sanders ride over the ice, spreading a good two inches of clean sand; when the ice melts, the sand settles onto the plants to do its magic. Sand can also be dry-deposited or spread from a floating barge. The plants themselves are remarkably long-lived—some in Massachusetts are 150 years old. They like to be pruned occasionally, and the resulting stems can be disked into the soil (again with a handmade machine), where they generate roots and begin to spread.

With 13,000 acres of bogs in Massachusetts, that’s a lot of work going on. Can you make money after all this? “Sure,” says Herndon, “they say you can make a good living if you have 20 acres per person.” He smiles. “I have 19.35.”