Thursday, February 7, 2008

One of my best childhood memories....

is farming as in working at my grandfather’s cranberry bog harvesting cranberries. The name "cranberry" derives from the Pilgrim name for the fruit, "craneberry". Cranberries best grown on vines in impermeable beds layered with sand, peat, gravel and clay. These beds, commonly known as "bogs," were originally made by glacial deposits.

My grandfather had nice large cranberries bog in Hanson, MA back in the 1960's which was in the same area that first cranberry sauce marketed in 1912. Hanson is a town in Plymouth County, in the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy metro area. Cranberry packing house built here eventually became Ocean Spray Corp. In 1930, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc. formed as a grower owned marketing cooperative. In the U.S., most cranberry sauce (and cranberry products in general) is produced by the company Ocean Spray. Ocean Spray is an agricultural cooperative owned by more than 650 cranberry growers in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and other parts of Canada.

On an interesting note for those who loves MUSIC, John Lennon repeated the words Cranberry sauce at the end of the song Strawberry Fields Forever, a fact that Lennon confirmed in a 1980 interview.




3 comments:

Casdok said...

An interesting post! Must go and listen to John Lennon now!!

Merely Me said...

i drink cranberry juice each and every day. it is supposed to ward off urinary tract infections (a symptom of MS) i know...too much information. :>) wonderful post jim...i need to catch up!

Unknown said...

I was going to post sometime in the near future about the benefits of drinking Cranberry juice every day for people with Multiple Sclerosis or with anyone who commonly have similar infections.

I believe people are very educated now adays.

:)