NJ Cranberry Harvest Festivals 2010

 

OCTOBER 2nd & 3rd • Saturday & Sunday 11-5:00pm

Bordentown: 21st ANNUAL CRANBERRY FESTIVAL 

Fine arts & crafts; vintage vehicle show; music & entertainment for everyone!
Questions? Contact Jackie Reed  at (609) 298-8066.

OCTOBER 9th • Saturday 10:30-4:00pm

Wells Mill County Park: 16th ANNUAL PINE BARRENS JAMBOREE

Featuring the sounds of the Jersey Pines, traditional crafts of the Pines, nature and history programs, kids' programs and Piney Vittles!

Questions? Contact Wells Mill County Park at (609) 971-3085.

OCTOBER 10th • Sunday 11-4:00pm

Whitesbog Village: 15th ANNUAL PINELANDS DISCOVERY FESTIVAL

This daylong event, held at historic Whitesbog Village in Browns Mills, celebrates all aspects of the Pine Barrens. This year expert speakers and tour guides will bring visitors on real and virtual tours of the ecosystem and its history. Musicians celebrate the region in song and exhibitors proudly show their wares. Releasing a rehabilitated wild bird marks the official start of the festivities and the importance of this region as a haven for wildlife. Great food and children's activities round out the day. Parking is $7.

Questions? Contact pines@bcc.edu or call (609) 893-1765.

OCTOBER 16th & 17th • Saturday & Sunday 9-4:00pm

Chatsworth: 27th ANNUAL CRANBERRY FESTIVAL

The Cranberry Festival is a celebration of New Jersey's cranberry harvest, the 3rd largest in the United States, and offers a tribute to the Pine Barrens & Culture.

The main attraction is the diverse showing of many artists & craftsmen, some of whom will be demonstrating their crafts as well as displaying them for sale.

Admission to the festival is FREE.
A donation of $5.00 will be accepted if you use our highly recommended parking area at the school located off of Second Street.

Questions? Contact lgiamalis@aol.com.

Yes, It's Hot

Temps are in the mid to upper 90s, so we're running sprinklers to keep the vines cool and healthy.

Burlington County Earth Fair 2010

With the exception of 2009, the American Cranberry Growers Association has had a booth at the Burlington County Earth Fair for a few years now. The booth was never as busy as it was yesterday! I seriously underestimated the amount of interest there would be in our "Bog in a Cup" project and in our recipe books.  The 720 packages of sweetened dried cranberries disappeared in four hours. The recipe books, "Burlington the Beautiful" magazines, and festival information sheets were all gone by lunchtime.

I brought enough materials to build 35 mini-bogs, and they were gone 90 minutes after the Fair opened. I hope some of the families who brought bogs home with them will let me know how well they grow--especially the family of the Boy Scout who was looking for indigenous plants for a badge (glad I could help!). I had a lot of fun with the kids!
I met Jon Runyan and invited him out to see the harvest. He looked skeptical when I said we have waders that will fit him. I met a couple of people who work with the Rutgers University Ag Extension and a couple who work with the Whitesbog Preservation Trust. Visit the Whitesbog blogs if you're interested in history: Whitesbog Village and Whitesbog: The Life and Times. They've inspired me to devote a couple of future blog posts to some ACGA history.
I always enjoy talking with teachers and nurses and hearing their perspectives on our materials. One teacher in particular gave me some great insights into the design of our activity sheets--very helpful, as we're in the process of designing a booklet to compile them!
Of course, my favorite part is always showing people something they didn't know about cranberries. Quite a few people enjoyed looking at the plants that I brought, as they had never seen them before. There were a few people who thought cranberries grow in water. Some people had never tried sweetened dried cranberries--but after tasting them, they came back for seconds! Several people told me they love putting dried cranberries in salads; one person likes them with sunflower seeds. How do YOU like to eat cranberries?

A lot of bees and a little chicken

Apples, sweet cherries, blueberries, peaches, and, of course, cranberries are among the many crops for which colonies of honeybees are typically rented while the crop is in bloom. Pollinators, such as honeybees, bumblebees, and wild bees, carry grains of pollen from the male parts of a flower (the anthers) to the female parts of a flower (the stigma). When the pollen reaches the stigma, seeds develop and then become fruit.

We have the beekeepers place their colonies throughout the farm, usually along the edges of intersections of the dams that separate our bogs. Different growers use different densities of honeybees, but our rule of thumb is to use about two colonies per acre. The bees start coming in early June and will be removed around the fourth of July.

We go out and walk the bogs to observe and measure bee activity, and I have no problem walking around in the vines while the bees are there. However, I would very much like to photograph some bees in action, but to get close enough I'd have to lie down in the bog--and I just know I'd end up getting stung! So far this year I've chickened out photographically and this is what I've got:

Our esteemed colleagues in Massachusetts at the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers Association have an excellent slideshow that makes up for my cowardice.

Where did cranberries get their name?

Since the blossoms are beginning to appear, this is a great time to answer this question. Early European settlers named the fruit of Vaccinium macrocarpon "craneberries" due to the resemblance of the stem and flower to the neck and head of a crane. Before long, the "e" was dropped and they've been cranberries ever since.

Frost

Since the water was taken off of the bogs, we've had to keep one eye on the development of the buds for this year's growth and the other eye on the weather forecast. Because the air temperature in the bogs tends to be lower than the temperature outside the bogs at night, our guys are frequently on frost watch during this time of year.

How it works is this: depending on the forecast--if it's going to be clear, cool, and calm--the farm manager sets a time for someone to go out and monitor the thermometers that we have set in the vine canopy all over the farm. When the temperature gets close to cold enough to damage the developing buds (the more the buds open, the more susceptible they are to cold--the buds are those dots in the middle of the leaves in the picture), the frost crew is called in to start the sprinklers.

When water freezes on the vines, it maintains the buds at a warm enough temperature to keep them from being damaged. The sprinklers are run until the ice melts in the morning.

Some growers use more high-tech methods than we do. There are temperature sensors available that can be monitored via computer, some that call the grower when the frost temperature is reached, and some that will start the pumps automatically. (We're investigating our options, but because we need to have people out to handle the water for the pumps, we'll probably never eliminate the human element at our place.)

Planting Vines

We're in the middle of taking the water off of the bogs to begin the growing season, and planting is underway.

Cranberries are perennials and don't need to be replanted every year, but on our farm, we renovate a few bogs each year to improve yield (by planting new varieties) and  to minimize water use (by leveling the ground and replacing inefficient irrigation systems). We also use the opportunity to improve drainage.

There are two ways to plant cranberry vines. One way is to mow or rake vines from other bogs and spread them on the ground, then press them in with discs. They root in about a month. It's less expensive than the other method, but the vines don't always establish as quickly as we would like.

Since we're planting a new variety right now, we're planting a different way. We purchased rooted stolons from Integrity Propagation and are planting them with a rig that we pull behind a tractor. Four workers sit facing backwards and drop individual plants into a carousel. Each carousel feeds two chutes which drop plants at pre-determined intervals into a little trench that is opened up just before the plant falls. Two tires set at angles behind the chute push the soil back around the plant and close the trench.

We currently plant about an acre a day this way, and if the plants establish well, we'll be able to get a small crop off of them after two growing seasons.

It's a Draw

It looks like the rain is gone and sunshine's going to stick around for a few days. This winter has made it tough for us to get our outside work done. We still have plenty of sanding to do before we pull the water off in April. I hope the roads dry out quickly so we can get back to hauling sand safely. Meanwhile, our water gurus are busy with the early draw, which means they take most of the water off of the bogs that make up an irrigation system so we can install the sprinklers. Then they reflood those bogs. If we waited until April to install all of the sprinklers, we wouldn't have time to get them all installed in time to protect for frost. (I'll try to get out soon to get some pictures of the guys putting in the sprinklers.)

Our sprinklers are used for frost protection, irrigation, and heat protection. We don't have any pop-up sprinklers, although there are growers who use them. We keep them installed through the entire growing season, then remove them just before the bogs are harvested to prevent damage. Removing and reinstalling the sprinklers every year is time-consuming, and sometimes very cold and wet, but it's yet another job that is crucial to the success of our farm.

March Directors Meeting

Yesterday we had a meeting of our board of directors. Among many other things (including the Cranberry Marketing Committee meeting that I talked about earlier), we discussed the impact of proposed budget cuts at a county and state level, the New Jersey Agricultural Society's annual dinner, and weather monitoring systems. We talked briefly about setting up a meeting of our public relations committee to explore options for the sale of our award-winning film, New Jersey's Red October, which was produced by Nancy O'Mallon and has aired on NJN and WHYY (read a very nice review here). I was happy to hear that Ocean Spray is planning to send its mobile tour to the Chatsworth Cranberry Festival this year to distribute product samples (although that hasn't appeared on their website yet).

The first public event of the year where we'll have a presence is the Burlington County Earth Fair at Historic Smithville Park. It's a nice event, never too crowded, but still plenty of people there. According to the information sheet the organizers sent us, it "will be another great day of family fun, including entertainment, environmental displays, demonstrations, workshops and activities for the whole family with a theme of 'sustainable green living'." The weather has been pretty good every time I've been there, although one year it was unseasonably hot. The Earth Fair will be held on Saturday, June 19, 2010, from 10:00 am until 4:00 pm, rain or shine. If anyone has any suggestions for displays or interactive activities (especially for kids), please let me know.

Cranberries in the News

You see a lot of media about cranberries in the fall. Every year, our farm gets maybe a dozen or so requests to photograph or film the harvest.There's always something newsworthy in the industry, though. Here are links to some recent articles about cranberries at the Olympics...

• New York Times
• USA Today 
• PR Newswire 

...some recent articles about health benefits...

• Heart health 
• Blood pressure

...a couple about how agriculture has been faring in different growing regions...

• Oregon  
• Canada

...and my personal favorite:

• Cranberries at McDonald's!

Drop me a line if you run across any interesting articles that you'd like to see featured here.

To Market, To Market

I've just returned from Washington, DC, where the US Cranberry Marketing Committee held its winter meeting. The Committee traditionally meets twice a year. The summer meeting moves to a different growing region each year (it was New Jersey's turn in the summer of 2009), but the winter meeting is held in Washington, DC, for access to personnel at the US Department of Agriculture and other officials with interest in the Committee. It's an open meeting with active participation from the audience, who represent cranberry growers and handlers from around the country and the world.

The Cranberry Marketing Committee was established in 1962 as a Federal Marketing Order. It's intended to maintain supply and demand equilibrium for US-grown cranberries. In the past, an oversupply of cranberries has led the committee to regulate production, but the current focus is on increasing the generic promotion of US cranberries in a number of markets around the world. If you visit the website, you can find links to the Cranberry Marketing Committee's websites around the globe, in addition to a bunch of great recipes and other information about cranberries.

Why aren't there any fresh cranberries now?

Oooo, this is an easy question! Almost all of the cranberries in the world are produced in North America. The harvest season typically runs from mid-September through mid-November, and most cranberry bogs are harvested wet--you know, like you see in the commercials with those two guys in waders? Wet-harvested fruit is most suitable for processing; it's sold to be used for juices, sweetened dried cranberries, sauce, and the like. Wet-harvesting is the most efficient means of harvesting.

A small number of acres are harvested dry for fresh fruit. Bags of fresh cranberries are easy to find in most markets during October, November, and December! Unfortunately for people in NJ who are looking for locally-produced cranberries, the vast majority of our growers exclusively wet-harvest. Locally-grown cranberries can be found in some local supermarkets and farmers markets during the fall, and quite a few can be found at the Chatsworth Cranberry Festival in October.

To have fresh cranberries during the rest of the year, your best bet is to stock up in the fall. Cranberries freeze very well. Sort through the berries before freezing them, but don't rinse them (they'll freeze in a big clump if you do). They can be frozen for six months (I've kept them for longer, but six months is the generally accepted interval) and can be used without thawing in any recipe that calls for fresh cranberries.

Do cranberry growers all go on vacation during the winter when the bogs are flooded?

My favorite answer to this question is, "Yes, we all go to Florida and count our money."

Unfortunately for my tan, that particular answer isn't true.

Here in New Jersey, we do flood the bogs for the winter to protect the dormant cranberry vines and their buds from damage from the cold. That doesn't mean there isn't plenty of work to do! On our farm, we build and repair machinery, maintain the dams (roads between the bogs) and gates (structures for moving water between bogs, reservoirs, and canals), build and repair the boxes that we use for transporting cranberries to our packing house during the harvest season, build new gates, build new sprinklers, work on bog renovation when the weather is suitable, plan for the upcoming season, attend grower meetings, and deal with standard business issues like budgeting and taxes.

One winter task that is unique to cranberries is the practice of sanding. The story goes that cranberry cultivation began in 1816 as a result of a Massachusetts man noticing that the wild cranberries near his home grew better when sand blew over the vines. Sanding has been an important practice industry-wide ever since. We typically put a layer of 1/2" to 1" of sand on each bog every 4-5 years. The sand covers the layer of "organic matter" that develops below the vines as they lose some of older leaves each year. This helps to stimulate growth, reduce weeds, and suppress some insects.

This is my aunt visiting where they loaded the flatbed carts back in the railroad-sanding days...

On our farm, we used to have portable narrow-gauge railroad tracks that we would use to run little flat-bed carts from a sandhole to a bog. Men shoveled the sand directly onto the dry vines. Fortunately for everyone involved, a New Jersey grower developed a system of barge-sanding flooded bogs in the 1970s. We run a barge back and forth across the bogs on a cable which is anchored by a tractor with a winch on one end and an excavator on the other. Dump trucks haul sand to the site, back up to the excavator, and pile the sand for the excavator to load the barge.

...and this is me and a family friend riding along with my dad on a barge sander.

Allow Myself to Introduce...Myself

I'm Becca. I'm a fifth-generation New Jersey cranberry grower and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Cranberry Growers Association (and currently the secretary, too). If you've visited our booth at any local festivals in the past three years, there's a good chance that you've met me. I'm going to use this space not just for ACGA news and events, but to let people know what might be happening on my farm on any given day, to point out new developments in the cranberry industry worldwide, and to highlight interesting facts or articles that I might run across.

I'm going to try persuade some other growers to chime in here, too. Tom, who was kind enough to set up this blog and the ACGA's website, works on another farm and can testify to the fact that although the principles of cranberry growing are the same across the board, we all handle things a little bit differently. Not only do our methods evolve independently over time, we take ideas from other growers and tweak them to suit our own circumstances. We work closely with the researchers from the Philip E. Marucci Center for Blueberry and Cranberry Research and Extension and with the companies that handle our fruit to ensure that our cranberries are grown using the most efficient and healthful techniques and materials available. Ours is truly a cooperative industry.

Next Topic: Do cranberry growers all go on vacation during the winter when the bogs are flooded?

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Cranberry Bogs On Ice

Welcome to NJ Cranberry Blog.  A place to keep up with all the ACGA (American Cranberry Growers Association) events and news.