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.)

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.

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.