NOTE: Bala will be having a Cranberry Festival on October 12, 13, and 14 - an excellent time to go and have fun, as well as stock up for yourself. Bala is home to Ontario's only two commercial cranberry farms.
The cranberries are grown on quite a large farm, and there are trails one can walk on in addition to the roads through the bogs.
The store is an easily-accessible little building just off Highway 69 (Highway 400).
I think if it's possible to do it with cranberries, they've done it. The mainstays though, I would think, are dried cranberries and pure cranberry juice. Prices are favourable compared to the mass-market retail brands, provided you stock up a bit. If you are a cranberry aficionado it is well worth it.
We bought a case of pure cranberry juice and 25 pounds of sweetened dried cranberries.
The cranberry farm (bog) is directly behind the store. It's a long, skinny farm, snaking through the floodplain of a small river or stream. It isn't spectacularly wide, but it goes back a long way.
We walked through the farm. Those dusty, sandy Muskoka roads took me right back to my childhood, when we spent what seemed like endless summers at the cottage.
After walking for several minutes, we came to a cross-road. The bog continued on in two different directions.
To harvest the berries, the bogs are flooded, the cranberries are knocked loose, and they are corralled from the surface, as they float like little boats.
Ripe cranberries ready for harvest.
We walked up to the processing shed. Although we were too early to watch the harvest, it looked like they were in the middle of doing a test run on the sorting machinery.
It looked like quite the state-of-the-art contraption.
Up, up they go and into the shed.
Where, alas, very little was happening, apart from the fact that 2 men had the panels off and their heads stuck into the guts of the machinery. It is a fact not much publicized to the urban public, but it seems to me that if you want to be a farmer, you need to be a more than passable mechanic first!
We chatted a bit with this lady; one of several workers hanging about waiting for the machine to be started.
As mentioned, we bought lots of dried sweetened cranberries and a case of pure juice. Should keep us for a little while... expect to see some cranberry recipes coming up soon!
2 comments:
Well I don't think you can really help with the harvesting, but you can definitely visit - I did! In fact, right now is the time to go. There'll be more to see and do than when I was there.
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