Thanksgiving Leftovers: Cranberry Harvest In Eastern Massachusetts

If you need more Thanksgiving before December hits, we have a dozen or so pictures of the local cranberry harvests. We're emptying the picture stash into this, so some may be blurry. 

You need more than one truck to harvest cranberries... one to store them, and one to, uhm, pump water and stuff.

Those trees could have helped us out by going all fall foliage, but No. I wonder if the farmer uses foliage color as a sort of harvest alarm, i.e. "when the oak turns scarlet, flood the bogs."

Those commercials for Ocean Spray should have more Cape Verdean crews in them.

We try to get all of the crews in our shots.

Add 25000000 pounds of sugar, boil, strain..... Voila! Cranberry Sauce for everyone in Belgium.

We're berry, berry happy that you chose to visit our humble site.

There's that machine without the two trucks attached to it.

The cranberries won the popular vote, but the water ruled the Electoral College.

Red tide

Blurry as hell, but kind of cool.

The closer-to-shore berries erected a Trump wall to keep the mid-bog berries from coming over and causing 9/11.

Any larger than this, and the pic gets reallllllly blurry

I'm not sure if the farmers or if Ocean Spray divides the red and white berries. I try to not bother the workers with questions when I trespass on their job site.

If they harvested in July, my Facebook profile picture would be my silhouette in those berries after I belly-flopped into them. Unfortunately, my first status update would read "being beaten by a Cape Verdean cranberry harvest crew."

Blood on the highway... oh wait, that's just a big cranberry stain, like on Gorbachev's head.

We tend to work Carver, Plymouth and Wareham heavily, as they sort of encircle our office.

We hope that you enjoyed our cranberry articles.

See you next year!

The Trillion Cran March

You know that a publication named Cranberry County Magazine is going to bombard you with burgundy as Thanksgiving nears. Our photographers were all over eastern Massachusetts, seeing who had the goods. 

We focused heavily on Plymouth, Carver and Wareham. You could also draw a triangle running from Duxbury to Freetown to Yarmouth Port, and assume that we stumbled through every bog in it.

Cranberry County University mathematicians estimate that our photographers captured 1,000,000,000,000 cranberries on film. That's a trillion, babe....

Even a rotten photographer like Stephen can do OK if he works with acres of berries directly in front of him where he can't miss them.

The urge to push him in from behind while he was taking this shot was almost overwhelming.

I totally want to wade two strippers into that and have them wrestle for three rounds while drunks throw money at them.

Let's roll through the cranberry harvest process. First, you get a cranberry bog.

Then you flood it, and hire this dude to roll through it with his cranberry-loosening tractor which probably has some technical name that I'm unaware of.

Once he's done, you have acres of floating berries.

Enter the workers...

Cool man, rotten shot...

Sorry for the blurry, but this is the tube which sucks up all the berries that the Cape Verdean guys pulled into a pile.

I think this is where the water goes after the berries are sorted out of it, or it's where they're getting the water. I don't know this farm stuff that well, I was raised in f*cking Dorchester until it was too late to make a farm boy out of me.

The cranberries then get pumped up into a big truck, where they get sent off to Ocean Spray.

The big truck in question.... you would need a corresponding truck full of sugar to create a 15000 sq foot serving of cranberry sauce.

Sometimes, the truck spills some cranberries, people run over them, and you get roads that look like this. This is in Carver... and, no, it's not the Cranberry Highway. That's in the 'Ham.

Cranberry Jones got his nickname at Yale, where he spent his freshman year eating nothing but cranberry products in an attempt to turn his skin burgundy. It didn't work, he had the runs for 7 months and he's now our organized crime contact.

We've got the boys working hard, and we'll be back over the weekend with some more shots.

Rural Exploration, And Our Fall Preview

Middleboro, MA

Autumn is here, and we're shifting gears into Fall Stuff.

When I was teaching at a Charlestown charter school, we had a class called Urban Exploration. "Urb X" was a code word we'd use for "our lesson plan got fouled up for some reason, so we're going to take the bus around Boston and show the sights to the kids. Give me lunch money for 8 kids and 2 staff."

To be fair... although I was most likely the one who had the fouled-up lesson plan, credit for the terms "Urban Exploration" and "Urb X" goes to a football coach named Mr. Cawthorne or something close to that. Left to me, the title would have been the less-smooth-sounding "We're gonna take the bus and drive around town for 3 hours," which program directors of charter schools probably wouldn't sign off on.

Some of my better classes were from Urb X, and I tried to incorporate the same spirit into my career as a shabby-website content generator. We did a bit of Urb X yesterday... although, since we went up Route 105 and down Route 106, it was technically Rural X.

As we said, Autumn is here, so we thought we'd trot out a fisherman's platter of what we'll be up to over the next few months.

I'm thinking maybe Lakeville, MA, Fall 2014

We have several trips planned to cover Fall Foliage. Ideally, we plan to catch some late September foliage in Maine, and then move down the coast with it until we are polishing up with Cape Cod after Halloween.

Marlboros costing $4.95 a pack in small-town New Hampshire has nothing to do with the frequency of these trips. Everybody buys 180 packs at once, Officer.

We also have a bee in our bonnet about stealing acorns from New Hampshire, planting them along the Cape Cod Canal, and turning the Canal into the Fall Foliage destination of 2075 AD or so, whenever the trees grow enough to turn Yellow regularly. We'll be pumping that article out after I interview a few experts.

Cranberry County Magazine has road offices in Freeport, Maine, Bow, New Hampshire, and Jeremiah's Lot, Vermont. We're analyzing more spots than Matlock, and we've got this Leaf Game on padlock.

In theory, we'll have a 4-5 fall foliage article run that starts in Maine in late September and ends up on Cape Cod after Halloween. Droughts, wind storms, low motivation and lack of money/free time may screw up this schedule, but we're looking good as of 9/22.

We did go to Maine last week, but saw nothing foliage-ish of note. The locals told me two more weeks or so.

Plympton MA

Massachusetts, especially the part of Massachusetts we work, isn't as known for her foliage/greenery as other parts of New England are. However, you can find some good 1700s stuff if you snoop around a bit and drive down the side streets.

Between flowers and foliage and even us stumbling through some dude's farm, we'll try to go out among the reapers now and then.

The harvest, formerly the occupation of just about everyone, is barely important now to anyone but farmers, craft fair hosts and the media. However, there is still a primordial recognition in most humans for the harvest season. At worst, it is perhaps the most powerful omen for the change of seasons that we have.

I feel it, and I can't even grow old properly, let alone grow cranberries. We're looking at late October for the hard color pics.

Speaking of which...

Buzzards Bay, MA

Another thing that we intend to pound into the mat is the local Cranberry haul.

The mighty cranberry is in the title of this website, so you know that we're going to represent hard at the harvest.

The compound in Buzzards Bay is just across the street from a cranberry bog, so we should be able to get this one done just by walking the Shorty out to the bus stop.

The possibility of us going inland and upstate to pursue non-coastal cranberry harvests is there, although I shouldn't need to drive any further than Carver or Hanson.

I'm a hack photographer at best, but even I can get some Ansel Adams work in if I snap enough shots at a cranberry bog with the sun shining overhead.

There is also talk of scooping a few buckets of cranberries out of Mann Farm's vast pile, dumping a few bags of sugar into a big pot, cooking/chilling, and then seeing how much cranberry sauce I can eat in one sitting. The goal would be to turn my skin burgundy.

Billingsgate Farm, Plympton MA

You know we'll be talking about pumpkins, player!

Pumpkins figure heavily in our harvest season, even more than the more ubiquitous cranberry. They are the premier decorative item for both the harvest season and Halloween, to the point where a great majority of the people who buy pumpkins have no intention of eating them.

We'll use pumpkins for photos, articles about visiting pumpkin patches, articles about decoration, Thanksgiving pie recipes, Halloween vandalism talk, and even excuses for doing vintage D'Arcy Wretzky image searches.

One thing we're kicking around is the idea of gathering (via a lot of Rural X, or from Facebook friends) a collection of pictures featuring the better Halloween displays. We'll do the same for whoever we see over-lighting their house at Christmas.

Halloween is important to us, and we also plan to run our Expand The Bridgewater Triangle article during this season, and perhaps explore a few haunted locations in our coverage area.

We also want to blow up a pumpkin with whatever fireworks we can gather up on our Foliage trips. This, and my idea to do a Diet Coke/Mentos experiment that involves tossing the bottle off of the Bourne Bridge onto the bike path below, is pretty much as deep into Science as we get here. I also have a great desire to film a pumpkin being shot by a high caliber weapon.

We actually are in preliminary discussions with a gun-range owner in Texas about re-creating the JFK assassination with pumpkins.

Me: I'm thinking that you get a pumpkin, fill it with Zar-Ex, put it in a suit, drive it around in a convertible and shoot it from 6 stories up out of a moving limo.

Them: Huh?

Me: Don't worry, I'll pay for the ammo, the pumpkins, the Zar-Ex and lunch for the shootist.

Them: How do you plan to do this?

Me: Don't worry about it. I can also provide the Kennedy accent for the doomed pumpkin. My girlfriend can do the Jackie O screaming. She's French, it'll be seamless.

Them (from TX): What's Zar-Ex?

Duxbury Beach, MA

We also will have the photographers embedded for any nor'easters that may come up once October comes around.

September and October have hosted some of our worst storms, including the Halloween Gale.

If we get our ship tightened up some, we'll try to get into some other towns for our nor'easter photography. I've always wanted to do a storm in Scituate, the Outer Cape, and on the Grey Lady.

I do have a press pass that, if I presented it to the cops and they called it to verify my vocation, would ring up my own phone. That should get me on the block.

It goes without saying that, should we get the opportunity to shoot a nor'easter, it will most likely be caused by weather conditions that will effectively cancel the rest of our foliage articles.

That should carry us through Thanksgiving...