Cranberry bogs use spiders instead of pesticides

Cranberry bogs use spiders instead of pesticides

Hey what are you doing let’s talk about cranberries! As you surely know, the cranberry is the official berry of my wonderful Commonwealth. The tart berry is one of only a few native North American fruits, such as pawpaw. The previous sentence has a lie because cranberries are not drupesand I know this because I just learned what a drupe is. Cranberries are actually epigynous or false berries, something else I just learned about that we won’t talk about anymore because this post is about making nightmares and not destroying dreams, which are actually two different actions. (Unrelated, North Carolina can’t decide on an official berry and has both an official red berry and an official state blue berry. (You’ll never guess the official blue berry in NC.))

Massachusetts boasts 30% of the global cranberry areawhich is a lot and also a very nice and true fact. Most cranberry products come from Oceanspray, a farmer-owned cooperative with 700 member-owners. This is a neat and less capitalistic model than most corporate juice production, which may make Oceanspray products taste a little sweeter. You remember this TikTok which increased sales for both Oceanspray products and Fleetwood Mac.

Cranberries are grown in bogs, but since bogs generally cannot support the weight of a large person, farmers harvest cranberries by flooding the bog and gathering the cranberries together like so many sour red sheep. In this analogy, cranberry sauce is the wool of the sour sheep. And below is where the nightmares start, so don’t consider moving forward if you’re of a mild disposition.

All of this was unnecessary prelude to getting to what I really want to tell you about, which is, according to this lost Tumblr postif you’re trying to get a job in a cranberry bog you might be asked how you feel about spiders and that’s a weird interview question and you might consider not telling the truth because what you want to do is wake up early and be one with (false) berries. What you want to do is go back to your mossy roots. What you want to do is grow cranberries as a cranberry farmer. But if you have a problem with spiders and you don’t say anything, it becomes another problem, and friend, it becomes a big one. You see, cranberry farms have moved toward more organic growing methods that eliminate the use of pesticides, and to keep the insect population down, farmers encourage wolf spiders to live in the bogs. I’m sorry, I meant WOLF SPIDER. And when they flood the bogs to harvest the cranberries, ask the WOLF SPIDERS, probably called WOLF SPIDERS because they look like little 8-legged wolves, not me, I’m not an arachnobiologist, the deluge flees to higher ground, because while they can swim like Michael Phelps , they don’t prefer it. So they seek higher ground and guess what that higher ground is, Joann, it’s you. You are the higher ground.

And then the cranberry farmers will ask you how you feel about spiders before they hire you because you might have dozens of swimming WOLF SPIDERS climbing out of the water up your waders and into your hair, but you have to be fine with that, because WOLF SPIDERS are your employees in the cranberry bog, and everyone, even WOLF SPIDERS, deserves a safe working environment. Put on a turtleneck or something. You might be thinking, that’s fine, WOLF SPIDERS don’t bite, and if they do, they’re not poisonous, but they do bite, and they’re poisonous, but maybe it’ll all work out if you let them use you to higher ground.