Color comes with the cold,” says Courtney Hammond, while standing at Lynch
Hill Farms in coastal Washington County, where he helped his parents build cranberry bogs decades ago.

It’s the third week of October, and three generations of the family are at their usual places: in the shop, in the processing shed, or outside, like Hammond is, for the fall harvest rituals. Tree leaves have fallen or are hanging on in colors of gold, garnet, and pumpkin orange. Everyone knows to keep a close watch on the thermometer this time of year. Chilly temperatures are needed for the cranberries to burnish to ruby red, but a hard freeze will damage the crop. There’s a balance, Hammond says, and they flood the fields with water as needed to protect the ripening cranberries. Picking at the proper time is essential.

“I harvested Early Black until it got so dark last night that I couldn’t see,” he says, referring to one of three harvest too. “I love this fresh air,” he says of days cranberry varieties that the farm grows, along with Pilgrim and Stevens.

Afterward, he slept in his truck beside the bogs so he could monitor the temperatures. The berries can tolerate temperatures below freezing, into the mid-20s and even lower-20s, especially as the berries redden and ripen. “We really tease out that deep red color by waiting for it to drop a degree or two before turning on the water pumps,” he says.

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Hammond is wearing a red sweatshirt when we catch up with him—almost as if demonstrating the optimal berry color. In the midmorning hours, he’s surveying the nine cranberry bogs that his family cultivates at their downeast farm in Harrington, about a 50-mile drive up the coast from Ellsworth. A teenager who lives nearby is working in the nearest bog. Michael Cowland, who is wearing a black ball cap, guides a small harvesting machine with a 5.5-horsepower motor that’s controlled by walk- ing behind it. The contraption requires two hands to steady it—sort of like a shopping cart—while it chugs along and collects, rotates, and shakes berries into rectangular bins.

When he takes a break, Cowland says he’s considering becoming a farmer himself one day and that he helped with the farm’s summer blueberry harvest too. “I love this fresh air,” he says of days outside in this easternmost coastal county. Plus, he likes to munch a few cranberries along the way, before they are sugared or juiced or cooked into a sauce. “It’s something tart, and some people, they don’t like the cranberries like this. But I do—and the deer do, too.”

He points out that, since there’s no fence around the five acres of bogs, deer sightings go with the territory.

Ocean Spray, Almost

The tidal reach of Flat Bay comes within 400 yards of the cranberry and blueberry fields at Lynch Hill Farms. A sea fog often sets in, and the low tangles of cranberry vines grow and produce fruit—after pink blooms in June and July are pollinated by bees brought here in boxes each year.

Nothing’s guaranteed, though. A late-spring freeze or a long summer drought can severely impact the yields, and the 2020 season had both, resulting in a tough year for many Maine-grown crops, including about 80 percent fewer cranberries at Lynch Hill. “Farming is a gamble,” Hammond says. But he and his family have been sticking with it. They sell a variety of products besides blueberries and cranberries, including vinegars and sauces made with the berries, shiitake mushrooms, and balsam holiday wreaths.

It’s one of those sweater-weather gray days of fall. I bend down and pick a couple of the gumball-sized cranberries, polish them on my shirt, and notice the sheen of the dark red skin. They look firmly ripe. And it’s a satisfying pop when you bite into one, just moments after plucking it from the vine. I like them, too, I tell Hammond and Cowland—not too sour at all.

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Wild History

Hammond, who also serves as president of the Maine Farm Bureau, explains that cranberries are one of the few native wild fruits in North America that are cultivated commercially—along with Concord grapes and blueberries. The low-to-the-ground vines of the American cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) are found growing wild from the mountains of Georgia to the Canadian Maritimes and as far west as Minnesota, according to online resources from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

And the berries are intertwined with Maine history. You see them in place names, such as Cranberry Peak in the Bigelow Preserve in western Maine and the Cranberry Isles around Mount Desert Island, so-named in the 1700s because of the vast cranberry marshlands, including some 200 acres on Great Cranberry Island.

According to agricultural accounts, commercial cultivation of cranberries began around Cape Cod in the early 1800s then expanded throughout New England. Most of the Maine cranberry growing in the twentieth century was in home plots, until the state invested in resources for small cranberry growers in the late 1980s. That’s when farms like Lynch Hill got started. Courtney Hammond recalls driving a bulldozer to help his father, Robert Hammond, dig and establish the farm’s bogs.

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A Cranberry Curiosity

This to-the-source cranberry excursion by photographer Peter Frank Edwards and me was spurred a few years ago when I noticed the cranberries I’d just bought in Belfast came from a one-acre bog less than a dozen miles away, in Lincolnville Center. With a few bags of berries in hand, I found a recipe for cranberry sauce online and another for cranberry Irish soda bread (from the cookbook Saltwater Seasonings, coauthored by Jonathan Chase of Blue Hill). I got to cooking and baking. Since then, I haven’t found many cranberry recipes I don’t like. So we stock up on cranberries at Lynch Hill Farms with both fresh and canned versions.

Our next stop is another Washington County cranberry farm, the Sugar Hill Cranberry Company in Columbia Falls, at the end of winding dirt roads through the woods. Under a steely fall sky, we come to the 11 acres or so of cranberry bogs established by the founders, Christine and John Alexander. Clay and sand line the bottoms, and raised berms around the edges help to hold water for occasional flooding.

John explains that, when they use the irrigation system to flood the bogs for a wet harvest, natural air pockets inside each berry cause them to “float like bobbers.” Cranberries harvested through the wet process are processed for juice and jellies. The dry-harvest berries are sold as fresh berries, which can be stored for months or frozen. On this day, he’s using a mechanical, walk-behind harvester, similar to those at the Hammond family’s farm. During the dry harvesting at Sugar Hill, the berries are gathered into burlap bags. At the edge of the bog, I look inside an open bag to see some of the garnet-hued haul. Leaves and bits of green vine are also strewn throughout, and John explains that the fresh cranberries will be bagged by hand after going through a 1930s-era winnower that shakes off and sorts out everything but the berries.

Meanwhile, on the Sugar Hill website and social media pages, Christine Alexander regularly offers inspiration for enjoying cranberries—not just at fall and winter holidays but year-round. Her posts have included pictures of bees buzzing at the bogs, cones of cranberry ice cream, the Sugar Hill demonstration booth at the Fryeburg Fair, and upside-down cakes and cranberry squares. When we talk, the conversation quickly turns to savory recipes, including a chicken stroganoff she made recently using cranberry vinegar. I’d like to try that sometime.

Winery Walk

For one more cranberry experience on this fall junket, Peter Frank and I spend the next available sunny afternoon on a drive through the midcoast countryside toward Sweetgrass Farm Winery and Distillery, due west of Camden Hills State Park. The tasting room and shop is inside a vintage barn on a hillside with panoramic views, and there we find cranberry bitters, cranberry gin, and apple-cranberry hard cider, all made with Maine cranberries.

We buy a couple of bottles of spirits for sipping so we can continue this cranberry immersion. Peter Frank tells me he has a cocktail in mind with cranberry gin and ginger ale. I’ve already made the dough for a cranberry yeast bread with some of the fresh cranberries. (It’s rising at home.)

But first, we take in a little more of the sweet fresh air of the season. Just beyond the tasting room deck, visitors can follow trails down toward the Medomak River. We walk a while on paths past fields edged with milkweed pods that have burst open in silky threads, and we follow the downward slope to woods and the river valley.

That’s when I recall that cranberry grower John Alexander mentioned the possibility of happening upon Maine’s wild cranberries, including near scenic roadside turnouts and river bends, “if you know where to look.” Since I’ve just seen up close how cranberries twist and grow, I keep an eye out for wild vines in this landscape, but don’t see any. Later, we clink rocks glasses with a toast to the bogs and producers. And when the tree leaves start to redden and drop this year, I’ll be ready to stock up again with fresh cranberries from local growers for plenty more cookery—and cocktails, too.

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Read more culture stories:

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  Claiming Space at the Table
• 
  How to Go Antiquing Like a Mainer
• 
  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
• 
  Milkweed Man