Cranberries

For the third year in a row, my dad and I have taken a trip to Wisconsin Rapids to buy cranberries to ferment and make wine. We stay with Mary Brazeau Brown in her Stone Cottage at Glacial Lake Cranberries. Her family has owned this land and farmed cranberries for at least a hundred years. She owns 4000 acres, most of it protected, but 300 acres are in cranberries. She is the cranberry ambassador, she has so much energy and it rubs off onto me. I come home every year totally interested in cranberries. It's always a good trip, the colors of the trees up there are always a week before ours, and seem so much more vivid. The reds and yellows really stand out. The cranberries are beautiful too. It's always colder up there too, last year it frosted.

Since the camera was broke this year, I will post some pictures from last year. I shared these pictures with some of you last year via email. The cranberry bogs are flooded, and raked off the plant, and the cranberries float, and they scoop them up on a truck with a conveyor belt, and then ultimately into our bins to make the trek back to Missouri.