Cranberry Harvest

This time of  year is harvest time for cranberries, and western Washington is apparently a great place to grow the fruit.  I've been wanting to go down to the Cranberry Museum in Long Beach, WA, for a while now, but we decided to go yesterday when they had their annual cranberry festival.  Long Beach is about an hour and a half south of us.  I was hoping we wouldn't have to tour the bogs in the rain, and I got my wish.  It was a beautiful day, and the museum was lots of fun.  Since they were in the middle of harvesting the cranberries, we got to see part of the process.  I guess the cranberries we buy in the store are dry harvested, whereas the process we saw was wet harvesting.  They use the cranberries in wet harvesting for juice, jellies, etc. (most are sold to Ocean Spray).  That makes up for about 95% of the business.  Only about 5% of the cranberries harvested are actually sold in the whole fruit form (from about now until Christmas).  Those have to be picked dry so they don't get bruised.  Those that are wet harvested are flooded with water.  They use a machine to shake them loose from the vines, and the cranberries float to the top of the water.  It was very interesting and informative.

I enjoy eating lots of things with cranberries, so I was hoping for some yummy food, and I wasn't disappointed.  I had a delicious pulled pork sandwich with cranberry bbq sauce--honestly, very tasty.  Josh had a turkey sandwich with cranberries.  In addition, we tried a cranberry muffin, some cranberry lemonade, some cranberry strawberry jam, cranberry ambrosia, cranberry coleslaw, a cranberry caramel, and Eli and Josh had a cranberry bog frog--a chocolate covered caramel, cashew, and cranberry treat.  My mouth is watering again. :-)  And of course, we couldn't come home without some fresh cranberries!