Sunday, September 30, 2018

Massachusetts - Day 29 - cranberries and coastline


Sippewissett Campground
Saturday, 29 September 2018
today's route
This campground is very near Rt. 28, and as I was waiting for a chance to turn onto it, I saw 8 wild turkeys feeding in a small plot of grass next to the road.  They were a little alarmed when I pulled up and stopped, but then they kept on eating.  Pretty neat to see so many of them.

RV maintenance
I went first down the road a piece to the Jiffy Lube in Mashpee (has to be an Indian name), a town between Falmouth and Hyannis.  Jiffy Lubes are happy to help me out if they’ve got doors big enough to handle my little guy, and I usually call ahead but I’d passed this one several times and could see that they did.  And they did.  I walked the dogs around on a decent sized patch of semi-landscaped lawn for a bit till they were done.  A young guy who’d helped work on it said he thought my RV was “awesome!”  He said he could totally see himself driving it all over the country.  So I told him that’s what I was doing, which he thought was a great idea.


Route 3A
From there I was on my way back up to Rt. 3A, which runs through the little coastal towns up to Plymouth, and the most direct way was across the Sagamore Bridge.  I decided this was a demon I needed to face, and that I could do it in the left lane, so I did.  But I was seriously terrified – really terrified – for miles on either side of that bridge.  Anticipating it, driving it, trying to relax after it was past – didn’t matter that I’d figured out a way to do it.  I was trembling all over, my hands could hardly hang onto the steering wheel, my foot could hardly work the accelerator pedal, I had to make my jaw not drop open, my breathing was haywire – it was a real event.  But I didn’t hit the curb and the dogs were undisturbed, not knowing there was anything different going on.  What a bizarre experience.

The Massachusetts countryside was very pretty, but the state highway department is either truly negligent or filled with major tree-lovers: over and over I’ve had the problem of not being able to see direction signs clearly because tree branches haven’t been pruned in way too long.  It happened again this morning when the sign that said turn left here was so completely covered that I could barely read it as I drove by it just a few feet away.  Which meant that, yet again, I’d have to find a place to turn around, being peeved because this one was definitely not my fault.

The first turnoff that looked useful turned out to lead to the entrance of the recycling center.  This being Saturday morning, lots and lots of people were coming to drop off recyclables, so I quickly became a nuisance.  A guy leaving the center stopped to ask if I was lost and needed help, and I told him I was just having problems with Massachusetts not trimming the tree branches covering their road signs, and he agreed it was a problem.  Then he said he used to have a 27’ RV and loved it but wished he had a smaller one like mine.  I guess this was RV Admiration Day.

As I was getting back on the right road, I saw a much larger flock of turkeys – must have been 25 or more – feeding in a field.  And no, it wasn’t a turkey farm; it was a reservoir or pond of some sort.  Pretty neat seeing all these wild turkeys.  But after all this is the Plymouth area, and we all know what the Pilgrims supposedly ate at Thanksgiving.

As I was nearing Plymouth, I found a turnoff for Plymouth Long Beach and decided it was time to stretch our legs.  Smelled very strongly of seaweed and salt water and sea smells.  You can’t see it in my photo, but there’s a lighthouse at the end of that spit of land.  I think the buildings in one of those photos are part of Plymouth, which was just down the road a bit from here.

I wasn’t interested in visiting Plymouth Rock, not believing much of the stories we’ve been told about it and the settlers, and anyway I think my family came here when I was a kid.  It’s easy to see that all these coastal towns are old, and all of them are figuring out ways of reusing the old buildings while making their town continue to be relevant for them in today’s world.  In other words, they don’t want to live in a museum but aren’t tearing down their heritage either.  Plymouth is the same way.

From there I turned inland along surface streets on my way to a cranberry farm, which I found with no problem, thanks to it being just down the road from the airport so I could follow the airport signs most of the way.

Cranberries
Flax Pond Cranberry Co., a family-owned farm, has been a member of Ocean Spray, which is a grower-owned cooperative, since it was formed in 1936.  This farm is among the 2% of cranberry growers that dry-harvest their berries.  When you buy a bag of whole cranberries in the grocery store, they were dry-harvested, and the dry-harvesters are known in the industry as fresh-fruit growers.  All water-harvested cranberries (98% of the industry) are processed and become cans of cranberry jelly and cranberry sauce and such.

cranberry fields


everything red is cranberries
The water you see in these photos was not wanted – it was from that deluge yesterday and has held up the cranberry harvest in these fields.  Industry standards say they can’t harvest as long as there’s water on the crop, so they’ve had to suspend harvesting until the water sinks in.

picker/pruner
They use this machine – a picker/pruner – to harvest the berries.  It’s operated by a man who walks behind it as it runs.  The machine picks the berries, trying not to disturb the plants, and prunes the vines that get caught in the machine.  The berries are funneled into a burlap bag attached at the top of the machine.  Full bags are left sitting in the field and the farm hires a helicopter to lift them from the fields onto a truck to take to the plant (which I saw not much farther down the road after I left the farm).  The guide said the helicopter expense is actually cost-effective, so they’ve been doing it for many years.

The plants at this farm were planted 125 years ago; this is not an industry that pulls up the plants to harvest the product – it’s more like the grape growers who harvest while leaving the vines intact.  Like grapes, cranberries grow on vines that can get quite long.  They can mat together along the ground and inhibit new growth.  Someone figured out, after an enormous storm relocated a bunch of sand from the beach to his fields, that sand helps separate the vines and encourages new growth (guess what farmers now do every year).

Cranberry plants produce pretty little pink flowers which, unfortunately, don’t make the fields look like a pink carpet because the flowers hang down toward the ground.  In June, this farm rents bees for several weeks to pollinate their plants.  When the beekeeper takes the bees home, he harvests the honey and this farm buys it back from him.  There are apparently quite a few people who want it because it’s unprocessed and so is useful for people with allergies (I think that’s what the tour guide said).

You may be able to see in my photos that this farm has a sprinkler system, much like a suburban lawn does, and they water the cranberry plants just as a lawn is watered.  In the winter, though, they take off the sprinkler heads and flood the fields 4”-5” above the tops of the plants.  This protects the plants because the top of the water freezes without damaging the plants farther down in the water.

The cranberry growers are coming to a crisis, unfortunately, due to increasing use by water-harvesters of hybrid plants.  They produce berries that are far larger than ordinary cranberries, so the yield/acre is too high for the market to bear.  The USDA is curtailing production from all growers and the price is plummeting, which means the small growers are having trouble making ends meet.  Plants with ordinary berries produce about 125 barrels/acre; hybrid plants produce 300-500 barrels/acre because the berries are so much larger.  And this is why the market’s getting flooded.

There are 228 different kinds of cranberries (did you know this?) and only 10 of them are cultivated.  This farm grows 3 different kinds.  Cranberries, blueberries and Concord grapes have always grown wild in this country; cranberry cultivation began in the early 1800s.

More countryside
I had left the campground fairly early this morning so, by the time I was finished at the farm, it was still only just after noon.  I decided to do a little more coastline driving.

The thing about this whole southern part of Massachusetts is that even when I’m driving on the road along the coast, I’m not on the coast.  These county roads are only 2 lane/no shoulder roads, but whole towns and villages aren’t visible.  Instead it’s like with Sandwich the other day: I see a sign saying “Wareham Center” and, if I want to see more than a few shops and travel-related businesses, I have to turn off the road.  That fact keeps on surprising me – I keep on driving these small roads expecting to see the towns, and I keep on being surprised that I’m not seeing them.  (Slow learner, here.)

This fact was brought home to me in Wareham (pronounced ware-ham, not ware-am like my name) at the grocery store when the young man checking me out told me what he liked best about living there was the beach.   And I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a beach, or of beach-related businesses.

I still want to visit the New Bedford Glass Museum, but by the time I got in the vicinity it was mid-afternoon and I decided to head back to the campground.  I’ll stop on Monday on my way to Rhode Island, I think.

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