Cranberry Harvest Celebration
Fall in New England is mythical. Brightly colored leaves, wool sweaters, apple cider, pumpkin patches, and cranberry bogs. Even though I’ve been here almost half my life, I have never seen cranberries being harvested. Until Saturday! We traveled to Wareham for the 9th Annual Cranberry Harvest Celebration at A.D. Makepeace, one of the largest cranberry producers in the area.
After following a line of cars off the highway, and parking in a sandy, boggy field, we walked a highly organized path to the festival. Can you imagine my delight when I saw these oversized swan and duck paddle boats as we entered the festival grounds. We went straight to the dock!
We ended up with a duck and paddled our way happily around the pond before heading back. These are just the coolest things!
We decided the smartest thing to do at that point was to skip the festival activities for now and head straight for the cranberry bog. We got right on a bus and drove maybe 10 minutes to see the actual cranberries.
I mean really! Could this be anymore perfect?
One of the questions I am always asking is who was the first person do this and how did they discover it? So who figured out there were air pockets inside the cranberries and they floated if you flooded the field? Brilliant.
Isn’t this glorious?? It’s like a giant Christmas cocktail.
I so wanted to dive in there and swim around in all those berries! A little backstroke maybe.
They had built a viewing area where you could watch the berries coming out of the water, the leaves and junk sorted out, and the truck filling with bright red berries.
Amazing, isn’t it?? I could have watched this all day!
They gave us some berries right off the conveyor belt. Soft ones were nice and sweet. The harder ones were super tart.
And this, my friends, is going on my list of Jobs That Are Better Than Mine. Cranberrymobile driver. Some headphones. Some tunes. And off you go, stirring up the berries. So much fun!
The festival itself, which was half by the bog and half back at the Makepeace store site, was enormous. We helped ourselves to some awesome barbeque.
There were several locations for music.
A store filled with cranberry products, which we loaded up on!
Activities for the kids.
Activities for the adults.
And a tent filled with crafters and artisans.
I had the best time! It was also 80 degrees and I got to wear my beloved shorts again. I cannot tell you how organized they were. It was so impressive. When we left, we saw huge lines for the buses to the cranberry bog and the largest line of cars I’ve ever seen to get to the parking area. So glad we arrived early!
And now I can say I’ve seen cranberries harvested. #225 on my Mother List complete!
