A sea of red berries stretches across the cranberry bogs on

Stolen Tree Farm.

On any chosen day in mid-October, Cape Cod's cranberry bogs are

transformed into perfect ecosystems: sandy-bottomed, weed-filled, thick

crimson ponds full of fruit, the berries' gorgeous hue perfectly

complements fall's climaxing foliage.

On one of those crisp red days last fall, we visited Pat Harju Zimmer's

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bogs at harvest time. Zimmer, who owns 11 acres of bogs on West

Wareham's Stolen Tree Farm, is a fifth-generation cranberry grower

whose cranberries are cultivated each year by wet harvesting. The

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process transforms bogs into ponds--this is when cranberries are

transformed from plants into healthy food.

By any measure, the harvesting of cranberries is unique. What other

crop is first flooded in water, then manually corralled, and finally

suctioned up through tubes onto a truck? The answer is: none. Dawn

Gates-Allen from the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers Association says this

is one of the questions the organization is most commonly asked. And

it's true; no other fruit goes through a wet harvest. But every fall,

1.8 million barrels--at 100 pounds per barrel--of cranberries are

cultivated this way in Southeastern Massachusetts.

The statistics are impressive. This tart, red, air-filled berry is

Massachusetts' top agricultural export. It's one of just three

commercially grown fruits native to our continent. (The other two are

blueberries and Concord grapes.) About 40 percent of all cranberry

growers live on Massachusetts soil; about one-third of the world's

cranberries are grown here.

By harvest day, Zimmer's tasks have been completed and she can sit back

and watch. Zimmer cares for the bogs during the year--doing off-season

tasks like frost protection, sanding, flooding, fertilizing,

etcetera--but her harvests are run every year by bog manager Wally

Wollcott. A man with a long family heritage of growing cranberries,

Wollcott's autumns are spent running wet harvests, but he still

remembers a time when cranberries were a wholly dry-harvested crop. The

wet harvesting process is still relatively new, having been developed

in the 1960s. Before then, all berries were dry harvested in a slow,

labor-intensive process. In the industry's early days, this method

involved scooping berries from the bogs with a large, wooden, hand-held

scooper. The multi-toothed scoopers were eventually replaced by

walk-behind mechanical pickers, still used today by a few dry

harvesters.

A retired teacher, Zimmer has lived on these bogs her entire life,

minus a few years she spent living in Boston. Wanting to experience

"the other side of the fence," Zimmer missed the crimson harvests and

eventually returned to her roots. "Parents say it's in your blood," she

says of the cranberry-growing tradition. "I'll be damned if it isn't."

Each harvesting process has its pros and cons, and some

growers--namely, organic growers--still practice the dry harvest way.

But most berries in the industry are now harvested by water: about 85

percent of the cranberry crop is wet harvested. The thousands of

cranberries being sucked from Zimmer's bogs will travel just a few

miles down the road, straight to the Ocean Spray processing plant in

Wareham. Zimmer is a third-generation Ocean Spray grower--one of 750

members of the corporate cranberry cooperative that handles up to 75

percent of the world's crop.

Wollcott recalls that when his family was dry harvesting their bogs it

might take an entire day to harvest half an acre. Today, wet harvesting

11 acres is a three-, sometimes four-day project. It's far more

efficient.

Wollcott preps Zimmer's bogs, taking between 20 and 25 hours to flood

the 11 acres, and once that is done, it is time to knock the berries

off the vines. The fruit doesn't float up to the top on its own. This

task is achieved with the help of water reels, a machine which Wollcott

describes as a "mechanical lobster." Growers drive through the

water-filled bog and the machine gently knocks berries from the vine.

The next day, it's go-time. Wollcott gathers his crew, clad in black

rubber coveralls and waders, and they jump into the water. The goal is

to collect all of the berries floating along the bog's far edge. The

seven-man crew line one side of the bog's perimeter with long, white

corral boards. Once in place, the 40 or so corral boards--heavy

separate planks of wood connected by canvas-like fabric--are dragged

across in unison. "They herd the berries in like cattle," Wollcott

says. Next the boards are pulled into a loop, gathering all of the

berries inside the planks, pushing thick berry puddles with a garden

rake-snow shovel hybrid. The crew guides the corral boards into a

35-foot circle and wait for the truck to show up. The corral process

takes about an hour, start to finish.

Not much later, a massive truck shows up to complete the harvest. It's

more or less made up of two parts: a sifter-sorter, which the berries

are sent through first and a tarp-lined bed, where the berries collect

once sifted from brush and water.

There are two crews now: one in the water, the other on the truck. The

guys in the water pull long pipe-hoses into the water, and place a

large-mouthed, vacuum-like contraption--which is connected to the truck

and will send the berries and water up through it--into the corraled

berry pool. After one to two hours, the bog is mostly drained of all

its berries. Only a few lone berries and sticks float in the cool, dark

bog water once the truck has departed. Left behind for the winter is a

sandy, good-sized pond. And the glorious cranberry harvest is over as

quickly as it came. Kara Cusolito is a freelance writer, originally from Bourne.