The American Fruit…by Matthew Pace

I thought I was cold that early New England morning until, I watched this guy waist deep in a freshly flooded field of cranberries.

By now, most have seen the video ads , you know the two guys standing comfortably in a lake of floating berries talking about their juice, looks good on the tube, just not as good as the real deal I saw the real people who produce it, not an easy thing for them to do, but a very cool thing to watch. It made me like them more!

So here I was at the capital of cranberries where Ocean Spray presides over the local growers, who supply them with these multicolored ruby-red little marbles of fruit.

Contrary to what I thought, they don’t grow in the water. They grow on vines along the ground and when the time is right, around late September to October, they flood the area from a nearby water source. The branches rise and along comes the “Water Reel” (video) or what they call Egg Beaters that slap those berries off the vines and float to the top. That’s called Wet Harvesting and often whole families take part.

Wet Harvesting cranberries a family event riding on the Beater and having a picnic at the same time.

So this Thanksgiving, when you slide out that ruby log out of the can to celebrate a real American holiday, know that you are eating turkey with a real American fruit.

Want to try a different cranberry sauce..click

A little history on cranberries…click      

For more images… click

For more on me…click

 

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18 Nov This entry was written by MiamiVisual and published on 12 at 4:25 pm. It’s filed under MVC Blog Post and tagged autumn, cranberries, documentary photography, Editorial Photography, fall, water reel, Wet Harvest. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.