Johnston's Cranberry Marsh

In the upper pictures you can see the cranberries floating on the surface waiting to be scooped up and also underwater still attached to the plants. Next is the machinery harvesting and dumping the berries into little floating barges. When we found a dry field I wandered in to check out the plants and found them loaded with berries hiding underneath the leaves. The plants are less than a foot high, if that, but lots of berries on each. I think they harvest using water because the leaves and berries float nicely and the water protects the delicate plants during the harvest. They use machinery to dislodge the berries and then harvest by using machinery to scoop them from the surface as I did with the little handful. It is very cool to watch them harvest and a pretty amazing process. It appears that the fields are flooded with about a foot of water which is then drained and used to flood other fields.