I had to go to a car parts place in Wareham today, which brought me through Carver. Southern Plymouth county, especially Carver and Wareham, are famous for cranberries, and now is the time to harvest them, so I hoped to see this iconic south coast image famous on postcards and calendars from these parts.

The cranberry harvest is an interesting and picturesque endeavor. Cranberries grow on vines rooted in sandy cranberry bogs. Ripe berries float, but sand doesn't, and there lies the secret of the modern cranberry harvest. A little Yankee ingenuity made the old rake-scoops obsolete in favor of much faster, less labor intensive water and pipes.

Each "bog" looks like a flat plain of sandy soil covered with a wiry vine and bordered by drainage ditches. Usually there is a nearby upland area with a pond behind a dam, and some pipes to the drainage ditches.  When the berries are ripe, the bog is flooded and the berries float to the surface as in the second photo above. Workers lay out booms and knock the remaining cranberries loose with rakes as in the top photo.

The floating berries are sucked from the surface of the impoundment and piped into waiting trucks. then they are brough to processors such as Ocean Spray and AD Makepeace to be made into products for consumption and culinary use.

The Makepeace company will host a cranberry harvest festival on the weekend of 6-7 October 2012.