Craft and Process

The Bog Of Delights

Vincent picking cranberries in the bog.

When Tyla and I were first dating, we made a pilgrimage to visit her mom and stepfather south of Boston. Pilgrimage is an appropriate term since her family has been in that area literally since the Mayflower. One of the things I found fascinating were the cranberry bogs that we would walk past in her mom’s hometown. They were smallish fields enclosed by a dike wall, with berry plants in the middle. The farmers would flood the bogs to harvest the berries, the ripe fruit floating to the surface to be whisked away. Growing up here, I had never seen or heard of such a thing.

Shortly after moving back to south Whidbey, I was introduced to our local bog by one of my friends, a longtime resident of the island. She told me that her family had been harvesting berries from the bog since at least the 1950s. 

Each fall, a group of us from the kitchen take the short trip to the bog and spend a couple of hours picking, by hand without the aid of flooding, all of the berries we will need for the upcoming festivities. It has become an Orchard Kitchen tradition.

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Abundance.