A Little Bit About a Lot of Things

For the past 70 years, the Rhodes family has been harvesting cranberries, and has made Cape Cod Select Cranberries a household name. If you’re like me, you probably only think of cranberries at Thanksgiving time, but they are great all year round. The Cape Cod Select website has a bunch of great recipes to choose from, both sweet and savory, that sound pretty darn tasty. I was most excited about these cranberry squares that we got to try when we arrived in Carver for our tour. They’re super easy to make and you can even get the kids involved. Find the recipe here.

In true New England style, it poured like crazy for the tour of the bog. Good thing we brought boots! We slipped on some waders and headed into the cranberry bog to see what it was all about. Cape Cod Select grows four types of cranberries, two that are harvested early in the season and two that are harvested late in the season. The type of cranberry depends on if they are wet or dry harvested.

They laser level the bogs so that they can efficiently reuse the water on the next bog when they flood them. When do they flood the bogs? Three times a year: to harvest, in the winter to preserve the bog (they let the water freeze and add sand on top), and occasionally for pest control (those pesky bugs can’t live under water 😉 ). They have about 800 acres of land, 200 bogs and it takes about 4 hours to harvest a whole bog. That big machine you see gently shakes the cranberries up to the surface where they are collected and packed into bins.

Cape Cod Select offers fresh and frozen cranberries and you can find them in most major retailers. If you want to find a store near you that sells Cape Cod Select Cranberries, click here.

After we got out of the rain, we toured the inside of the facility. We watched how the cranberries were sorted and separated from the stems.

This cool machine looks at the conveyor belt below it (that has cranberries on it) and can see the damaged, undersized or discolored berries. It then shoots air down at those berries and they go into a different bin – the “perfect” berries move on to packaging. Each bag is stamped with a code so that each bag can be traced to a particular bog and it can tell you when it was harvested. Pretty cool!

What is your go to cranberry recipe?

For more information, check out the Cape Cod Select website.

Tags: cape cod, events, seasonal