Cranberries: Gardening til the bitter end

November 9, 11:01 AMPhiladelphia Gardening ExaminerJoanne Taylor

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Cranberry bog in New Jersey - Harvest time!

This little red fruit is a cousin to the blueberry, and is bitter to the taste, although very popular during the Thanksgiving holiday. The vision that many people have when the word “cranberry” is mentioned is a body of water filled with floating red cranberries. Don’t get “bogged down” with this method; it has nothing to do with growing cranberries, but has everything to do with harvesting them. Cranberries are grown in bogs because flooding the fields is the way cranberries are harvested.   Wild cranberries can be found growing in acidic bogs and swamps throughout Northern Hemisphere. Cranberries are a low-growing, self-pollinating evergreen shrub, or a trailing vine, and both grow like a ground cover.   Runners cause the cranberry plant to spread and upright canes grow up from the runners to produce flowers and fruit. The more water, the faster the plants will grow.

Flower of the Cranberry before it produces fruit

.Believe it or not, cranberries can be grown in the Northeast and should be planted now for harvest next fall.  Planting cranberries in raised beds will allow for water retention. Although they do best in Zones 2 through 5, they are a major commercial crop in New Jersey and also grown in New York; and with a little extra care, many home gardeners have had success growing cranberries in Zone 6.  Growing cranberries is a fun and unique garden project, especially for the gardener that grows everything. Again, they should be planted in the fall through early or mid- November, or planted in the spring from April through May. Cranberry plants are sold to home gardeners, but it may take a specialty nursery to find them now. The lingonberry, a low-growing cranberry bush, is a little more difficult to establish. It’s an ornamental hardy evergreen in winter that produces two crops of cranberries each year, one in late summer and the other in the fall.

Cranberries grow on a low evergreen shrub and it grows like a ground cover

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THANKSGIVING:  STUFFING YOUR FACE THE BIBLICAL WAY:

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