A berry good time is coming
Nantucket Conservation Foundation hosts annual cranberry festival on Oct. 11
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER

PHOTO BY MICHAEL GALVIN

T hey are tart and zingy. They are scarlet and shiny and appealing to the eye. They are cranberries, and they are here in abundance.

On Saturday, October 11 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. the Nantucket Conservation Foundation will hold its free, annual Cranberry Festival to celebrate the harvest at its 200-acre Milestone Bog off the Milestone Road. The bog, situated in the midst of a 1,200-acre property, will be Ta busier than usual place this weekend. TJim Lentowski, the NCF executive director, listed event features as being hayrides, children's activities such as scavenger hunts, and samples of cranberry products made by residents including the talented students of the high school's culinary arts class, Daily Breads, Something Natural and Sweet Inspirations. There will be fuzzy, roaming Cotswold and Romney sheep owned by the NCF, fresh cranberries, bog honey and island wool for sale, and there will be displays of the workings of the Bailey sorting machine, an 85-year-old device that separates the good and bad berries. It "knows" a bad berry when it will not bounce after being given a few opportunities passing over boards built into the machine.

"If they don't bounce, they are thrown out," said Lentowski, who added, "people will be encouraged to walk out onto the dikes to see the cranberry harvest in action. This is the Foundation's traditional way to say thank you to the community and for people coming to the island who don't know much about cranberries.

"It's a happy time," he continued. "Last year we had over 1,000 people show up. There are lots of Nantucketers you don't see all summer who show up with their kids and grandkids and walk around. It's just an open house for people of all ages."

The Milestone Bog was once considered the world's largest bog and has borne its brilliant fruit almost continuously since 1860. The property was donated to the Nantucket Conservation Foundation in 1968 when Roy Larsen, Walter Beinecke, Jr. and Arthur Dean purchased what was then Nantucket Cranberries and folded the Milestone Bog within that for the holdings of the NCF. The original owners were Tom Larrabee, who has been and is the current bog manager, Franklin Bartlett, Walter Beinecke, Jr., Robert Congdon, Richard Corkish, Alfred Egan, Gordon MacDonald and Albert Silva. Larsen, who had a fondness for cranberries, spent a good deal of his own money to keep the bogs viable.

Lentowski calls the cranberry a hearty fruit, and said when planted and if tended with adequate water and weeding, it will not require replanting. This year's island harvest is just underway with the Early Blacks the first to be gathered and the berries most often used for juice because of their dark color. The later harvest is of the Howes berries, which are larger and utilized in processed foods such as cranberry sauces.

There are nearly unlimited recipes for cranberries, such as in butter, relish, bread, muffins, salad, chutney, cranberry crisp, in cookies, sherbet and cider. Some of these recipes will be available at the festival.

Cranberries were first cultivated in this country in 1816 on Cape Cod, where they thrived in its sandy, acidic soil with plenty of peat content. While originally harvested with scoops, an effective but labor-intensive method, after World War II the berries were rounded with mechanical pickers using tines that scooped beneath the berries and contained them as the picker moved ahead and plucked them from their vines. More efficient methods developed, which now utilize a water reel in a flooded bog with paddles on the reel that assist the berries in detaching from their vines with minimal damage to the fruit. The berries are then reined in by a boom-like apparatus and loaded into trucks via conveyor for transport to market.

Lentowski said "The Today Show" aired a short segment about the festival in late September during a program highlighting fall destinations.

To get to the event, take the first left on the dirt road just past the Tom Nevers turn on Milestone Road. Signs will indicate directions to the festival location. Rain date for the Cranberry Festival is Sunday, October 12. I