Cranberry bog
© SHSPhotography/Getty Image
A crimson quagmire. Happy Thanksgiving!
Whether made from scratch or plopped out of a can, your cranberry sauce started in a bog like the one seen here. Cranberry shrubs are planted in beds surrounded by dikes. Once the fruit ripens in the fall, the beds are flooded with water, creating bogs full of submerged shrubs. A harvester machine dislodges the berries, which float to the top of the water. Then they're easily corralled on the surface with flexible booms.
The very sour cranberries will need to be further processed, with lots and lots of sugar, to be palatable as turkey's best friend on the Thanksgiving table. Cranberries grow wild in the wetlands of North America and were an important food for Native Americans, who used them to make pemmican, a nutritious paste of berries, dried meat, and fat. Today, the US accounts for more than half of commercially grown cranberries in the world.
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