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!

Happy Thanksgiving From Cranberry County Magazine

Crossin' my supper dish!

Up until tomorrow (AFTER dinner time), turkeys will be very nervous. By Friday, they will be downright uppity.

Photographers, even bad ones, operate like apex predators do when stalking herds. Isolate one away from the pack and get him when you can.

You vegetarians out there might enjoy yesterday's article about cranberries. We may do a second version of that, we have a veritable pile of cranberry bog pics.

S'up?

If the water used to flood the bog was instead vodka, this would actually be a pretty good Cape Codder drink for Godzilla.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

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.

First Snow!

Some snow moved into our region from the west last night. I got nada in Bourne, but my friend Jenny D's Bees got these pics for us from Kingston.

Hardly a blizzard, but there is more coming. Mostly flurries, but even flurries are fun at the start of winter.....

... unless there are 40 mph winds, and you're doing this today. I plan to use that firewood, trust me.

Duxbury Beach, November King Tide

Stephen and Jessica got stuck at work yesterday, but have no fear... Duggan was here! By sheer fate, he happened to be just where I was supposed to be for the high tide. Or, since I was working for a church, maybe it wasn't fate....

Yesterday was a Supermoon King Tide, as you can see on this here chart. That's Boston, but same diff, player. The moon was as close to the Earth as it has been since the 1940s, and that made for huge tides.

Why I hire photographers.... here's me shooting the Supermoon.

Fortunately for coastal residents, the wind hadn't kicked in by the time (11 AM) that the tide was high. This meant "no surf," and took the specter of serious coastal flood damage off of the table. When the wind did perk up, it was between tides.

It never hurts to check the Bluefish River during King Tides. It's a shame that the kids were in school (and that it's November), because this was a prime Jumping Off The Bluefish River Bridge tide. I bet that somebody blew off school in 1943 to jump off that bridge during the last King Tide. A kid wouldn't waste a sick day on a bridge jump these days, what with the Internet and Drugs and Girls and Netflix and all.

I'm not joking when I say that I'd trade my Bourne cottage for this boathouse like thisquick.

If they never invented golf courses and peope just golfed through town (which is how I taught a generation of my students to play bocce in Charlestown, much to the amusement of the old guys who hung around the Navy Yard on sunny days), this would make a tremendous 18th hole..... OK, it would make a tremendous 18th hole if a tavern was within walking distance.

No weathered wood was spared in this shot. That's a mighty long dock, most likely a relic of Duxburys shipbuilding era. There is about 10% of me that imagines that it was built by a fisherman to be just 10-20 feet out of his wife's shouting-out-the-window range. 

It's unusual for the tide to get this close to the road in Duxbury. That's why they put the road there.

Thanks to Debbie D, we get this 3 shot panorama of Bradford Lake in Duxbury. Oh wait, that's not Bradford Lake, it's Bradford's Parking Lot. It;s normally a meadow, until the tide water in the marsh rises above the level of the road between it and Bradford's. If you're considering the purchase of that large house on the left, know that this is what the meadow fills up like without a storm