fruits | MY SPECIAL DOCTOR

The fall harvest of ripe berries in the cranberry fields is a breathtaking event, thanks to the color impact offered by the berries surfacing at the water’s edge. Cranberry harvesting occurs once a year, beginning in mid-September and continuing until early November. There are two methods of collection: dry collection and water collection.

Dry collection

Dry harvesting is done by growers, who walk through the plantations, pushing carts equipped with mechanisms, which convey the berries detached from the bushes into crates. The fresh fruits are then transported to the farms where berry sorting takes place based on color and bounce ability. Dry or rotten berries and pier berries are discarded. This type of harvesting is mainly used for the fresh fruit market and for making culinary recipes.

Water collection

Water harvesting is another method by which bogs are flooded with about half a meter of water. “Whiskers,” special machines traverse the flooded fields creating eddies of water that help the fruit separate from the plant. At this point, the berries are easily gathered and harvested with suction pumps that perform an initial washing of the fruit. The cranberries, then, are transported to the farms for cleaning and subsequent stages of fresh product preparation. Blueberries harvested from flooded fields are used to make juice or sauces. In terms of volume, water harvesting yields more than dry harvesting, but tends to reduce the quality and shelf life of fruit in storage. Berries can be damaged when they are placed in water and crushed during mechanical harvesting. Usually the water-harvested berries are immediately frozen or dried and packed in packages of various sizes.

Source: Cranberry – A fruit that never ceases to amaze by Mediserve

Taxonomy

Blueberry is the name for several wild shrub species in the genus vaccinium, including cranberry. These are semiligneous shrubs with oval leaves and white or pink pendulous flowers. The fruits, also known as blueberries, are a kind of berry. The genus vaccinium is divided into two subgenera and includes a total of 450 species, most of which live in the northern hemisphere with temperate and cold climates.

There is no shortage of blueberries in the mountains of tropical areas such as Madagascar, Hawaii, and Java. Bilberry, false blueberry, bog blueberry, and cranberry grow wild in Europe in forests and heaths up to 2,500 meters above sea level. For food distribution, giant blueberries with fruits twice the size of the wild species are usually cultivated.

The plant and the fruits

Vaccinium macrocarpon(i.e., cranberry) is a low-growing, upright developing plant. The shrub is characterized by small alternate oval leaves, with a bare stem at the bottom and full of branching at the top. The plant produces both vegetative and fruiting buds, and each fruiting bud can produce up to 7 flowers-most of these are formed from flowers on the shoots, but some berries also form from flowers on the end of horizontal branches. As for the leaves, their color is dark green during the growth period, and turns reddish brown during the dormant season. The fruits of the cultivated species are larger than those in the wild and consist of round red berries with a sour-tasting pulp.

The berries ripen in early fall and are harvested in October. Due to their hard skin they keep fresh for some time.

Source: The Cranberry – A fruit that never ceases to amaze by Mediserve