I tried to go watch this year’s cranberry harvest operations twice this weekend. Yesterday was a total flop. It rained hard, I got lost and arrived one hour late, and the harvest tour would not let anyone get off the bus for safety reason.
Today was different. The sun was out, and I drove to the Pine Barrens to find cranberry fields. Here’s how one looked prior to being flooded with water.
A closer look at the ripe berries:
This was a flooded field as a harvesting machine plucked berries from the vines to let them float to the surface.
Slowly but surely cranberries covered the water surface.
The machine operator, Herbert Armstrong, who is also a foreman for the Lee Brothers company, let me take pictures freely and even gave me a CD of photos of cranberry operations.
As he left at the end of the day, Herb was holding a GPS which he used to keep track of where his machine went in each field, so as not to miss any area.