Cranberry Festival

I was really very excited to find out that a small town near us has a Cranberry festival every year. The town is flocked by literally thousands of people (which I found out later!) to shop the craft booths, eat fries from chip trucks and tour Johnston's Cranberry Marsh. Had I know better, I would have just gone to the site of the Cranberry Bogs (I won't forget this for next year!) because the crowds, crafts and chip truck really weren't a draw for us-lol!

The Marsh is still run by the founding family and it is one of the only two cranberry marshes in Ontario. Cranberries are native only to North America and early settlers originally called them 'crane berry' because of the shape the flower takes.

The berries themselves are beautiful, the shades of deep reds in the autumn sun- stunning. Our tour first took us on a wagon through the marsh area where the berries grow. They explained how this perennial plant grows, the need to flood the marsh three times a year, the wildlife that visits there and the bears they keep out. It was interesting to learn cranberries don't grow in water. They are planted on a peat moss bog and it sits on top. It is then flooded for different reasons, at different times. At the end of the year the fields are filled with water so that the berries will float, allowing the raking machine to easily scoop them up without hurting the plants.

We then moved on to where the berries are processed. We watched the berries go through conveyor belts, where they were separated from any debris, graded and sorted into different bins for different purposes. They are then hand picked over and sorted again. Then they were packaged. We drank some cranberry cider, bought a twenty pound bag of berries with which we later cooked with and some we froze to string this Christmas.

It was a very interesting afternoon, its marked on the calendar for next fall.