90 Foot US Flag On Display In Halifax This Sunday

UPDATE: EXHIBIT CANCELLED DUE TO HIGH WINDS

National Flag Exhibit
Sunday, June 12, 2016 at 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Corner of Routes 106 and 58

There will be a showing of the 90 foot American Flag which was recently raised at Mount Rushmore on Sunday, June 12 from 4 PM to 6 PM at the intersection of Routes 106 and 58.

You won't have trouble finding it... as I recall, the flag needs to be lifted with a crane. It should be easy to spot.

Music provided by Delyte DJ Services. There is also an antique car show going on at the same time.

You can't get much more 'Merica than checking out a 90 foot Old Glory, player. No one will ever be able to question your patriotism.

The flag will be considerably better than the ones pictured here. I'm just emptying the Photobucket.

Pimping Plympton!

We have a large coverage area. We include Plymouth, Brockton, Barnstable, New Bedford, Fall River and Taunton in this area. None of those are Shanghai or London, but they are rather large when compared with Duxbury, Acushnet or Truro.

Plympton (pop. 2800 or so) is also much smaller than New Bedford or Brockton. Plympton is furthermore much smaller than Duxbury or Falmouth. It is Small Town, even by Small Town standards. I think of Plympton as a small town, and I live in a village of 4000 people.

However, the roads we travel making this website have led us to Plympton many times recently. We've been here for Halloween decorations, fall foliage, cranberry bogs and harvest festivals. I haven't had to even get near Fall River when doing these articles, which are admittedly rural in nature.

We'll use today's article to thank little Plympton for hosting us!

Plympton, once you dot the i's and cross the t's, is sort of the October capital of Southeastern Massachusetts. We recognize that the state champ is Salem, and that the reasoning is sound.

However, Plympton is as rural as eastern Massachusetts gets.

For 11 months of the year, there really is nothing there. I don't fear insulting Plympton residents by saying that, because I think that those people like it this way.

Some People Like Cities, or even the just-off-a-highway ease of a bedroom suburb. Some People, to put it simply, Don't.

I had time to kill with five students once when I was teaching. I got them on Mapquest, which was more of a novelty at the time. We were going to Halifax for a class fishing trip, so I thought I'd have them recognize the region a bit before they went.

While doing this, the kids- who were all from Dorchester and Cambridge and so forth- remarked on how sparsely populated the region is. I gave them the "people there like it that way" explanation that I used a few paragraphs ago. This led to a discussion where all of these city kids who live in tenement buildings with 500 people in them were pretty much united in their belief that the country people might be on to something with this trees-as-neighbors philosophy.

They phrased it more colorfully. "That's the kind of sh*t where Jason jumps out with the axe," said one. Another, who I'd gather had seen The Beverly Hillbillies opening at least once, thought that you could discover oil by shooting into the ground there.

Just for laughs, I had them zoom around on the map some, to try to find the Most Isolated Guy In The Region. I don't want to out the guy- whom it is safe to assume is a man who wishes to enjoy his privacy- but he lives in Plympton.

We did a few trips to Plympton in October. As opposed to, say, March, October holds plenty of reasons for someone to visit Plympton.

We hit Billingsgate Farm in early October. They are somewhat famous, as they are off Route 106 on the road from the Plymouth area to the Bridgewater area. Any commuting Bridgewater State College University kid from Duxbury or Marshfield probably spent some time rolling down 106.

We popped in to get some fresh produce (we like buying local when we can), and we also got a pumpkin. We were psyched to find that they had a pumpkin patch, a corn maze and all sorts of other stuff that you don't get to see in normal suburbia.

They also have a hay ride for the kids, which is something every kid should do at dusk as Halloween nears.

You can kind of see why people like Plympton just by looking around the fringes of the farm stand area.

Plympton has a lot of farms. You can spend several weekends during the Harvest Season banging around Plympton. I know this because I have spent several of the last few weekends banging around Plympton.

Even if you never get out of the car, Plympton is cool to drive though. This, early November, is the end of the foliage season in this part of the state.

If you do get out of the car, you have a lot of options. One of the better ones is Sauchuk Farm. Sauchuk is a working corn farm that doubles as a harvest theme park.

We were there on Halloween, just before they closed and we went trick or treating.

Sauchuk Farm rules if you are a kid. You have several awesome options. This is after you soak in farmland as far as the eye can see.

My kid liked the corn maze, part of which is visible in the picture above. We got deep in it without ever finishing, as we went out the same way we went in. We cheated, but we got to the elevated part for some panorama shots.

Estimates for maze-completion ranged from an hour to 30 minutes (with help), but I bet that we could have got 90-150 minutes if we continued to let the 8 year old be the head navigator.

We also liked the Corn Cannon, which is a deluxe potato-launcher thing they use to fire corn cobs 50 yards into the field. If you hit the furthest target, you get a pumpkin!

They had a food tent with fried dough, kettle corn and hot dogs, among other things. Eat there AFTER going on the bouncy house thing (no walls nor roof, not a house, but I don't know what you call it otherwise), if you know what's good for you.

They had a hay ride sort of thing that went out to the pumpkin patch. We didn't get that ride, as we arrived sort of late and decided to instead get lost in the corn maze. We also did the duck races, where the ducks are powered by hand pumps.

Of course they had a cow train, as any self-respecting farm should.

We could have spent a year there, as long as we didn't have to do the farm work. Farmers have a hard life, and I probably serve the world best here, entertaining.

We had to split, however. We had trick-or-treating to do, and the place shuts down at 6. Farmers go to bed early, so to better be up before the sun. Circadian cycle, or whatever they call that. That corn doesn't hoe itself, or whatever you do to corn.

We got one last shot before we split.

We spent Devil's Night in Plympton, as well.

We were invited to Snow Family Farm by Lindsay Snow herself, whose family was hosting their 24th annual Halloween party for the neighborhood. For the high price of nothing at all, they park you, feed you, light up a bonfire and take the kids on a haunted hayride. No one even came close to asking me for money.

My favorite part of this was the bonfire. Actually bonfires, plural. They had some steel drums with various Halloween stuff carved into them.

We'll end with those, because it's November 2nd and I really need to let go of my love for Halloween. We have Fall Foliage and Cranberry Bogs to shoot.

Thanks, Plympton!

Early Season Bog-Trotting

With a name like Cranberry County Magazine, you know it's only a mater of time before we head out into the bogs.

One disadvantage we have is that, much like the foliage, the bogs are flooded and harvested from north to south, and we live in the far southern part of that equation. That means that our bogs aren't being harvested like the ones in other regions.

Of course, bogs tend to be large and difficult to manage, and they have to sort of draw a grid and work section-by-section. It takes time to cover all of those acres, so we will be able to get all stages of the cranberry harvest cycle just by stumbling around town.

Today, we'll roll through Carver, Wareham, Plympton, Duxbury and Buzzards Bay. There are bogs all over our reading area, and we'll try to pop in on the more scenic ones as the harvest season progresses.

Our light was sort of rough, as you can see. We get the kid off the bus at quarter to four, and we had to make our way out into Bog Country, aka Carver.

I'm not that into Creationism, but if I was, it wouldn't be hard to rationalize God making Carver right after He figured out that cranberry sauce was tasty... or perhaps even after He realized that you need cranberries to make a Cape Codder. He probably got to it very early in the Earth-making process.

"I'd better allot some space for cranberries... right abouttttt... HERE!" (points at map, about where Carver will one day be)... and it was Good.

I have no intention of digging up this information, but I would guess that there is more acreage devoted to cranberry farming in Carver than there is to housing the whole population of Carver.

Somebody- be it God or John Alden or whoever- really liked cranberries, because southeastern Massachusetts is literally covered in bogs.

That works for us. Gas is cheap, and so is Cranberry County Magazine.

As I said before, the light was less than ideal. I'd do better with a 11 AM start time. Notice here that the trees are lit wonderfully, but the bog was very dark. I was shooting with late-day sun and tall trees behind me. This is what you get.

This is sort of a warm-up for future articles where they are actually harvesting berries via flotation. We dipped all over Carver and her neighbors, and most bogs aren't being flooded yet around here. I know the guy in Buzzards Bay told me "after Halloween."

Only part of one bog on North Carver Road in Wareham was flooded and had floating berries, and that is the one you'll see splattered all over this article. The bog above is still getting ready to drop.

By contrast, this bog below (in Duxbury) was flooded by her reservoir. We'll come back and check her out later.

You need all of that water for the bogs. Most and maybe all bogs are built near a copious supply of water. They sort of pump it in and out of the bogs as they need it, either to feed the cranberries or to protect them from the cold.

I don't know how they did it before the Industrial Revolution, and this may have required the efforts of 100 men and a bucket line for all I know. Now, they just use pumps.

Those little houses that you see on cranberry bogs usually contain the water pumping equipment. One of the structures may be an outhouse, so don't drink any water from them until you talk to someone who works there.

We want you healthy.

Here are the little houses. It's a bit blurry. The shot REALLY sucked before I got into the editing, and I don't edit photos very well.

The reason that you flood bogs, besides doing so to loosen the berries for harvesting, is to protect them from freezing temperatures.

Otherwise, everything gets all icy. This is a bad thing to have happen to fruit which you plan to harvest.

We did have a freeze the other morning, and OF COURSE the team went out to find a frozen bog for some ice pictures. We are up at the dawn and driving for miles and miles to get you shots like the one below.

OK, it's across the road from where I live., and I stared at it for 5 minutes before "taking a picture of it" occurred to me.

They may have already harvested that part of the bog, or else that could be an Epic Fail. I'm not agricultural enough to know for sure. They are always very kind to my photographers and I, so I'm hoping this is No Big Deal.

That bog (Mann Farms, in Buzzards Bay) has some sort of project going on that merits having a giant crane out there. We'll sneak out there for a pictorial when the dice come up that way for the column.

Eventually, they flood the bog and let it freeze. Then, they put a skim coating of sand on it.

I knew at least one kid in my school days who thought that bog owners sanded the ice to keep kids from skating on a Liability Ice Arena. No. They're actually just giving the vines a fresh coat of sand.

The sand goes on the ice, the ice melts, and the sand settles into the bogs all uniform-like. Gravity handles the distribution process well enough. The sand method was invented on Cape Cod by a man who noticed that cranberries grew really well in areas that the ocean had covered with sand after a storm.

Therefore, bogs keep mountains of sand handy for the winter, just like the Highway Department does.

We worked until the sun set, so we'll give you some cranberry bog sunset shots.

Here's the one I took:

Here's the one I edited:

We'll be back with more soon, and I promise to put Jessica and Sara on the camera next time.