Thirty-eight acres. Seventeen in vines. One pond that does most of the work.
Joan and Pete bought the marsh in 1998, north of Wisconsin Rapids on the river side. The rest is woods, ditches, dikes and the reservoir, which floods the beds in winter to keep the vines from drying out and floods them again in October to bring the crop in.
01 The bedsFour beds, 17 acres
Four Beds, Each With Its Own Habits
The Long Bed runs along the reservoir and is always first to colour, so the first fresh boxes of the year come off it. The North Bed sits in the frost pocket by the jack pines, where cold air settles on still nights in May, and it is the one Eli watches hardest.
Pete's Bed is the small square one by the pump house. The old vines there were tired and patchy, and in 2003 Pete replanted it by hand, cutting by cutting, over two weekends in May. It has been our steadiest bed since. The Ditch Bed is last to ripen and usually gives the biggest berries, which is why the 25 lb boxes tend to come from it.
- Earliest
- The Long Bed
- Frost pocket
- The North Bed
- Replanted
- Pete's Bed, 2003
Ice, Sand, Frost, Bloom, Harvest
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Ice floodDecember to February
Once the ground freezes we open the reservoir gate and let the water up over the beds, a few inches at a time, until the vines are sealed under ice. It keeps the cold wind from drying them out over winter.
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SandingEvery third winter
When the ice is thick enough to hold the tractor, we spread a thin layer of sand on top. It sinks through in the thaw, settles over the runners and gets them rooting again.
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Frost nightsMay and June
The new buds can die at 30 degrees. On a clear, still night Eli sleeps in the truck by the pump house with the sprinklers running, and comes in for breakfast at six whether or not it froze.
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BloomEarly July
The flowers are small and pink and bent over like a crane's head, which is where the word cranberry comes from. A neighbour's bees work the beds for about three weeks.
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HarvestLast week of September through October
The berries colour up, we flood one bed at a time, and the crop comes in over about five weeks. This is when the barn shop opens four days a week and the fresh boxes go out.
02 Flood weekOctober, one bed at a time
The Week the Beds Turn Red
It starts in the evening. Eli walks out to the gate between the pond and whichever bed is ready, usually the Long Bed first, and opens it. There is nothing to see at first except a sheet of water sliding in between the vines. I always go out with him. I have done it every year since 1998 and I still want to see it.
By morning the water is over the vines, a foot or so deep, and the bed looks like a brown pond with green showing through. Then the reel goes in. It is a big slow beater on the front of a machine that walks through the water and knocks the berries loose from the runners. A cranberry has four small pockets of air inside it, so once it is loose it floats. You can watch it happen behind the reel, a few berries at first, then a stripe of them, then the whole row.
By lunch the whole bed has turned from green to floating red. People who have seen it in pictures still stop talking the first time they see it in person. Then we bring in the boom, a long floating line we walk around the edge of the bed in our waders, and pull it into a curve to gather the berries into one corner, tighter and tighter, until they lie so thick you could almost believe you could walk on them. You cannot. Pete tried in 1999.
From the corner a conveyor lifts them out of the water, through a rinse and up into the truck. The truck goes to the barn, the berries go over Pete's bounce board, and the best of them are in somebody's 25 lb box by the weekend. The neighbours from Biron come out every year with a thermos and sit on the dike to watch, and some years we have more people on the dike than in the water.
My favourite part is the end of the afternoon, when the machines are off and the berries are corralled and it goes quiet. If the wind is from the west it pushes them up against the boom, and you can hear them knocking, thousands of them, like rain on a tin roof, only softer.
Joan
The Harvest Walk
Every Saturday in October at 10 am, one of us walks whoever turns up along the dike while a bed is in flood. It is free and takes about 40 minutes. Wear boots, because the dike is soft after rain. Dogs stay in the car, because they always want to go in after the berries. If it is raining sideways, there is no walk.
The walk is small on purpose, so please write first and tell us how many are coming. We reply with directions to the barn.
- When
- Saturdays in October, 10 am
- How long
- About 40 minutes
- Cost
- Free