Cranberry

a creeping member of the heath family, closely allied to the winter-green and blueberry. The large or American cranberry trails its thread-like vines over wet peat bogs from North Carolina to Minnesota and northeastward. Its oval leaves are evergreen. The red, solid, cherry-like berries weight their slender pedicels over into the moss in so perfect an arch as to suggest the name crane--or cranberry. Stewed cranberries are a favorite fruit on an American table. Turkey with cranberry sauce has become quite as indispensable a Thanksgiving adjunct as the traditional Christmas goose and apple sauce of England. The use of cranberries is not so well understood in England. A gentleman, acknowledging the receipt of a barrel sent by an American friend as a present, stated that the fruit arrived very fine in appearance, but that it had evidently soured on the way over.

An ideal place for raising cranberries is a natural cranberry marsh, with a supply of water brought under control by a system of dams and ditches so that the vines may be flooded to save the flowers from a late frost in spring, or the young fruit from an early frost in autumn, and yet so under control that the marsh may be dried out for planting and picking. It is often desirable also to flood the plants against an attack from insects. When possible, a reservoir, like a mill pond, is constructed at the head of the marsh. A flooded marsh looks like a lake.

New Jersey, Cape Cod, and Wisconsin are the centers of cranberry production. Large tracts, once deemed worthless, now yield handsome incomes. Wild cranberries are shipped from Nova Scotia to Boston. The Cape Cod growers, who appear to have gone about the business most thoroughly, consider an expense of $200 to $400 an acre desirable. The swamp is first cleared of loose moss, sticks, and stumps, pared to an even surface; then covered with four inches of sand. Cuttings--bits of runners six inches long--are dropped in rows and pressed into the sand obliquely, so that about an inch is above the surface. The field is kept clear of weeds by hand picking. A marsh is expected to come into full bearing in three or four years.

In time of emergency, as before an expected frost, or when old vines have about outlived their usefulness, a picker, made after the fashion of a scoop, with a bottom toothed like a comb, is used; but ordinarily cranberries are picked by hand at an expense of fifty cents a bushel. Men, women, and children come from a distance during the cranberry harvest to pick the berries. Fifty bushels an acre is a fair yield, which has been crowded up to 200 bushels. Growers expect $4.50 to $6.00 a barrel, though a price of 50 cents a bushel is recorded for May, 1894. The cranberry crop of the United States for 1905 was 910,000 bushels. The area of cultivation is increasing. In 1907 New Jersey was reported to have an area of 8,000 acres planted to cranberries; Massachusetts and Wisconsin, 6,000 acres each; Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York, follow in the order named.

See Blueberry