I've grown up around cranberries my whole life. My dad farms them and my hometown of Bandon-By-The-Sea, Oregon has a Cranberry Festival every year in which they crown a "Cranberry Queen." My sister and I have both competed, of course! We have a Cranberry Sweets store in which pretty much all the candy is made from cranberries, and Faber Farms, the company we sell our berries to, has a cranberry bog tour that tourists flock to almost every day. The first cranberry beds in Oregon were planted in Coos County (my hometown county!) in 1885 by a man named Charles Dexter McFarland from Massachusetts.
Cranberries are small, red berries that are pretty dang tart and taste really good after being cooked on the stove with a whole lot of sugar and some water (cranberry sauce). I often add orange juice and a few Christmasy spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, etc) for an extra zip. Most people do not eat them fresh, unless you grew up with them like me and have grown to love the tartness. They show up in candies, juices, sauces, and even in pill form for their health benefits! Although I know the answer to my question I ask, many others do not have this knowledge, and I would like to share some of it! So the question is, what is the process of growing cranberries, from beginning to end?
Here's a great Oregon site about the process of growing cranberries.
Lets start with the land. When my dad decided we were going to build cranberry bogs, what we called a "mushroom forest" was growing on the land. We used to go mushroom picking under the dense mass of evergreen trees that covered the land where our berries were to grow. I kind of miss that forest, but people kept trespassing and stealing all our mushrooms, and it was my dad's dream to have his own cranberry bogs to care for.
We had to bring in huge bulldozers and all that jazz to clear all the land and trees so that we could dig into the soil to produce what we call "bogs," which are actually just cranberry beds that are surrounded by dikes anywhere from about 4 to 10 feet high. But it doesn't look like the picture to the left right away! We also had to dig up sand and silt from another area on our property to lay down in the beds on top of the soil that contained the perfect amount of clay (to keep the water in when you flood it). And bogs must be watered, so we also had to dig out the pond nearby so it would hold more water and insert a pump system.
Then comes the peat moss (which I think already existed in our soil) and all that good stuff. Once the bogs are prepped for the vines, they look like big sandy rectangles. Then comes the planting. You don't plant them by seeds, but by vines! We decided to go with vines from two different existing farms, so we spread one batch in one bog and the other in the lower bog. The process of planting is pretty easy. You take a huge handful of vines and shake them all over the beds in an even fashion. Then, once the beds are covered with a thin layer of vines, a simple machine comes along and pushes them into the ground. After this is finished, it is time to get the whole sprinkling system fixed up and working.
Next you wait for a LONG time (3 years to produce optimal amount of berries to harvest). Of course, you don't just WAIT. Weeds will grow and pests and fungus will enter the bogs, so you have to tend to them all the time. My dad would go out every week and pull out the trees beginning to grow. You also have to water them frequently, but our sprinkling system took care of that as it turned on in relation to temperature differences. Water is essential to a good cranberry bog, as it is used for disease and insect control, frost and heat protection, harvesting, and protection from drying out and cold injury. Those sprinkler lines can break, and we've gone through quite a few pumps and repairing sprinkler lines! You must also make sure that the water is not just sitting, and this requires adequate drainage. When it comes to fertilizing, we have some trained professionals that come in and fertilize our bogs with the right balance of nutrients, because it really does take a trained professional to do so! Cranberry bogs require the right balance of acidity (they like acid soils), and a specific ratio of nutrients for optimal growth, so we figured it best to leave that to the experts so that we would produce optimal fruit. Here's a site about those specific nutrients if you care to delve into it deeper. 
Once a year, bees are placed on the dikes of the bogs in boxes to pollinate the flowers so they can produce fruits! You can see each stage of the growing season go by as the light pink flowers begin to bloom in late spring. 
Apparently, the name "cranberry" came from the flower, that looks like the head and bill of a crane. This is a picture of the blooms in my family's cranberry bogs. Can you see the sand/silt/clay mixture the vines grow on, and the bee pollinating the flower?
Now the fun part. After about 3 years, you're ready to harvest a nice big crop of plump red cranberries. This is done by flooding the bogs (which are actually more like beds until this point) about 2-3 feet deep and then bringing a beater machine in that beats the berries off the vines. You see, cranberries float, so when the machine beats the berries off the vines, they pop up all over the surface! It's a spectacular sight. 
Once most of the berries have been beaten off the vines, they are harvested. This is where the process is most fun. We slip on our chest and hip waders and wade into the berries. Starting at one end of the field, we use these boards called "booms" that you hook together to "corral" the berries to one side of the bog. This is our own harvest a few years ago!
Then, slowly, we disattach sections of the booms as the berries are lifted into a big dump truck by a machine, and soon we are left with a little section until they are almost all in the truck! This is my sister and her high school boyfriend pushing the remaining cranberries into the lift.And that's it! Cranberry bogs last for many years as cranberries are perennial plants, and once they start to dwindle, you can always replant! I've only known a few farms to replant, and there are a few bogs in Bandon that are about 50 years old! And remember, cranberry bogs are not actually bogs, they're beds...people have just been calling them bogs because of the flooding process for years, so I guess it's kind of stuck.
Cranberry Questions and Answers
