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.