28 November 2025

Do you have cranberry sauce left over today? When I was growing up we had sauce-shaped-like-a-can and it was always leftover. Half the family was polite about eating it on Thanksgiving but would not eat it later.

It doesn’t have to look like a can. This sauce gives a hint of where it came from.

In the wild, cranberries (Vaccinium oxycoccos) grow in bogs, scattered among other plants such as sphagnum moss.

Commercial cranberry growers plant them in a monoculture …

… inside diked areas that can be kept moist and flooded later.

At harvest time they shake the plants and flood the field. The cranberries float.

Harvesters use booms to gather them in.

Transferred from truck to truck and then to market.

And that’s how they get from bog to table.