Cranberries and Western Washington

Kim at the cranberry bogs
Kim wanted to get her feet in the Pacific. This is Long Beach,WA. It has the longest beach in the world at 28 miles.
This is where we ate this evening. The whole restaurant is over the water on a pier and that was an unusual experience.
This is an Olde English Bulldogge puppy named Rae. She was so cute and reminded us of Molly, our dog at home with Kevin and Patti Sommers.


Today we drove the car along the western coast of Washington. We stopped by a cranberry museum and test farm. It was quite interesting. Here are some quick facts on cranberries. Planting a bog starts when they use the cuttings or pruned vines and disc them into the ground about 4”. It takes a bog about 4 years to produce and it fully produces in about 7-10 years. A bog can last over 100 years without replanting. Cranberries don’t grow in a bog as you might think. They prefer well drained irrigated conditions. The flooding is a method of harvesting the cranberries. They float to the top of the water after they have been beaten from the vine by a machine. They float because they are hollow. 95% of all cranberries are harvested wet. These are used for juice and sauce. All berries you purchase whole are dry harvested. There is some weird rule that the harvest begins the second weekend of October every year. There is a rule that was made over a hundred years ago that if you start before then you get fined – and it still stands today. Just this week Ocean Spray asked the farmers to harvest some of the cranberries early while they are still white so they can make craisins (raisins out of cranberries). This way the craisins will be lighter colored than raisins. If they are red, the craisins look like raisins and that hurts the sale of them. There are over 200 varieties of cranberries but only ten are produced commercially.