At Pine Barrens fest, Cranberries 101

For many Americans - maybe most - cranberry bogs are about as exotic and mysterious as rice paddies.

So Joe Darlington and Brenda Conner, both fifth-generation cranberry growers, were happy to help the American Cranberry Growers Association organize Saturday's first-ever New Jersey Cranberry Harvest Kick-Off. The Garden State is the nation's third-largest cranberry producer.

For the scores of people at the free event, it was sort of like Cranberries for Dummies.

Under cloudless skies in historic Whitesbog Farm Village in Pemberton Township, the heart of the Pine Barrens, cranberry growers and researchers hung out at exhibit tables, explaining such things as the anatomy of a bog (kids could make a "bog in a cup"), pollinators and pests, weather science, the health benefits of cranberries, and much more. Although visitors were given giant fold-out maps and schedules, as attendance was light, the formalities quickly gave way to impromptu tutorials.

Conner, a history buff, explained that the Pine Barrens were all but decimated by miners of impure "bog iron" deposits before 1857, when James A. Fenwick - Darlington's great-great-grandfather - began cultivating the area's wild cranberries.

"They healed the land with a native plant," Conner said.

Fenwick's son-in-law Joseph J. White founded the eponymous company that Conner and Darlingtown now own, and built Whitesbog Village as a company town.

"I feel like I'm learning so much," said Anna Genovese, 25, of Woodbridge, who came with Daniel Andrechick, 25.

So exactly how are those ruby-red berries nurtured?

They do not grow in water, never mind the Ocean Spray commercial showing guys in waders awash in berries.

Nor do they grow on bushes.

They grow on vines (which look like bushes) below the grade of the surrounding land, which makes them vulnerable to freezing at harvest time - which is now, said Marc Carpenter, a grower with Joseph J. White Inc.

"The temperature this morning in Philly was about 50 degrees," he said. "In the bogs, it was 34."

The fix? When infrared heat sensors suggest the berries might freeze, sprinklers are turned on. The fruit gets encased in ice, and that actually protects it.

Water is also a key to the harvest. Tiny air-filled chambers in the berries make them float, so when the bog is intentionally flooded, berries free of the vine become a crimson tide, ready to be corralled by a boom and then pushed up a conveyor belt into collection trucks.

This "wet harvest" method is efficient but tends to mangle the fruit, which winds up being processed into juice or Craisins, said Judd Parker, Conner's son.

The "dry harvest" method - using a vine-raking machine invented by Darlington's father - is reserved for the unblemished berries that wind up in bags in the produce section.

"Less than 1 percent of the harvest is dry," Parker said. "It takes one man a whole day to do about an acre of dry harvest."

He laughed and said: "You have to be passionate about growing. And by passion, I mean suffering for something you love."