Cranberry Museum

So we have been to the Long Beach Peninsula many times, pretty much any time that we stayed at Seaside.  However every time that we have gone has been in the off season which means that the Cranberry Museum is usually closed. Well not this time. They got enough interest to open up on the Weekends. So we planned accordingly and went to visit. 

You can see the small shed at the back, this holds all the equipment for flooding the bogs.

The Cranberry museum is home to the Pacific Coast Cranberry Research Foundation was formed to purchase the Cranberry Research Station which was operated by Washington State University until  1992. The University still supplies personnel, while growers in the area farm the 40 acers of bogs. 

Cranberries have been grown in this area for over 100 years. They farm over 1600 acres in this area and there are over 235 growers from Vancouver, BC all the way down to Bandon, OR. 99% of the local growers are part of the Ocean Spray cooperative. 

The plant itself is a low-growing long lived evergreen vine producing runners up to 6 feet long. Leaves are dark green while growing and turn reddish brown when dormant. They flower in late May and once pollinated and the berries set, they reach maturity about 80 days after full bloom. Harvest occurs from late September through early November.  

Cranberries were originally hand picked using a stripping process using tines or fingers to comb through the vines, dislodging the berries and lift them up into a collector. Unfortunately this resulted in tearing or pulling the vines and increased the amount of pruning to get rid of the loose vines. There were also a lot of debris that had to be sorted from the berries.

As the commercial prospects increased they came up with flooding the bogs and a motorized beater move across the bog dislodging the ripe berries and they are collected as they float to the top. 

Ocean Spray delivers about 70 percent of its product to retail markets in juice form and 25% in cranberry sauce. The remaining 5% is sold as concentrated juice to other companies to make their own products. Local farmers are allowed to sell fresh fruit from their farms and produce their own lines of cranberry products. 

Cranberries have become much more popular over the last few years. Ocean Spray now does approximately $1.5 billion in annual sales. This is a doubling of their sales compared to 10 years ago. In 2022 over 403 thousand tons of Cranberries are harvested in North America in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and British Columbia and Quebec.