Cranberry Harvest and the End of the Growing Year

By early autumn the light here goes flat and low, and the fields that spent the summer being loud go quiet in stages. The blueberry nets come off. The last cut of grass comes in. And then, on ground that has spent the entire year being deliberately kept dry, somebody starts deliberately flooding it.

Cranberries are the reason. They are one of the three things this city's farmland is known for, alongside blueberries and dairy, and the harvest is probably the strangest looking piece of agriculture most people will ever drive past without stopping.

It is also, if you pay attention to it, the clearest explanation of how this place works.

What the flooding is actually doing

Cranberries do not grow in water. They grow on low vines in beds, and the water arrives at the end for one very practical reason: the fruit floats. Flood the bed, agitate the vines, and the berries come loose and rise. What you get is a field turned into a shallow red lake, with crews in waders walking a boom across it to corral the fruit into one corner where it can be lifted out. It looks ceremonial. It is entirely mechanical.

The part that says something about this town is where the water comes from and where it goes afterwards. We sit on a floodplain between rivers, farmed only because dikes, pump stations and a network of drainage ditches hold the water line where people decided it should be. During harvest that same infrastructure gets used in the opposite direction for a few days at a time, on purpose, under control, and then puts everything back the way it was. The whole municipality is a water management project with houses on it. Harvest is the stretch of the year when that stops being an abstraction.

Watching it without being a nuisance

These are working farms, not attractions. Almost all of the harvest happens on private land, behind gates, on a timetable set by the processor and the weather rather than by anyone's weekend. The reasonable way to see it is from a public road or from a dike trail that happens to run past, on foot, without parking in a lane a truck needs. A farm that is open to visitors will say so plainly. If it has not said so, it is not.

The Pitt Meadows Farmers Market is the sociable version of the same season, though what runs in autumn, and when, and where, varies year to year. Check the city for the current schedule rather than assuming this year matches last year. Hopcott Farms Bistro is the other dependable stop for anyone who wants the farm part of the experience with a chair and a roof involved.

The end of the growing year for everyone else

Autumn is also when the garden trade here changes shape. Amsterdam Garden Centre and Partab Farm & Nursery shift from the business of keeping things alive through summer to the business of getting things into the ground before the cold arrives, which in this climate means bulbs and it means anything with roots that would rather go into cool wet soil than into the dry end of summer. Specimen Trees Wholesale Nurseries sits at the other end of the same trade, wholesale rather than retail, which is a useful reminder that a fair amount of the green industry on this land sells to people who plant for a living.

Meadows Landscape Supply covers the unglamorous half, and it is the half most homeowners actually need. Autumn is when you find out whether your drainage works. On flat ground with a high water table, you find out quickly. Materials, and an honest opinion about where the water is supposed to go, are worth more at this end of the year than any amount of planting.

Then it all moves indoors

Once the fields are done the social life of a small city goes under a roof, and it stays there until spring. Foamers' Folly Brewing Co. is the local answer to the question of what to drink once the weather turns, and The Jolly Coachman Pub does the job a pub in a rainy place is supposed to do, which is stay warm and stay open. Neither one requires a plan, which is the point.

Why I like this season

The cranberry harvest is unsentimental. Nobody stages it. There is no long standing festival built around it that I would tell you to book time off for, and if the city is running anything seasonal this autumn, look at its calendar for the current year rather than taking my word for it. The harvest happens because the fruit is ready and a buyer is waiting. Then the water goes back where it came from, the pumps carry on doing what they always do, and the growing year quietly ends.

Nineteen thousand people live here and most of them will experience all of that as a slightly muddier drive on a Tuesday. That seems about right. It was never put on for us.