Ok so. The bogs. They’re not wet or boggy all the time. But see, cranberries float. So they’re REALLY easy to harvest via a “wet harvesting” approach. Some are harvested dry, that is, by just using a tool that looks like a comb to just. Uh. Comb them off the vine. But the rest? You just flood the bog, stir it up with giant eggbeaters to loosen the berries off the vine, and voila! Cranberries floating on the surface! Then you skim them off. Done. You drain the bog before next year’s crop and start growing again.

Highly, highly recommend perusing the Massachusetts Cranberry website. You can even tour these things! If you go in fall, some of them will give you waders and a big skimmer implement and you can try it yourself! Plus, most of the cranberries in the country are produced on family-owned farms.

(Feel free to DM for more info. I may or may not have once spent a fortnight studying the operations of a cranberry processing facility and how this related to the cranberry farmers’ consortium.)