Gophers Galore

Boy, am I in trouble.  Kathe is so annoyed at me tonight she won't even give me a treat.  I love this place, there are a million gopher holes and I just know there is a gopher in one of them.  We are at a KOA in Ilwaco/Long Beach, Washington for two nights.  She's mad because I have to stick my head down every single hole looking for a gopher.  I can't concentrate on anything else! She says she's tired of walking all over the park while I fool around.  I'm not fooling around, I really need to find that gopher!

On our drive down from Westport we passed acres of cranberry farms.  We were surprised to learn that cranberries have been grown in Washington since 1883.   Of course Kathe and Jim had to stop and visit a working cranberry farm and museum in Long Beach.  They learned a lot of facts about cranberries.  The fruit grows on vines, not bushes that are planted in sandy soils or peat soils.  Cranberries do not grow in water.  The plants are a perennial and a plant can produce for 100 years or more.  A good yield is 20,000 pounds per acre.

This is a picture of a cranberry bog.  The fruit will be ready to harvest in the fall.  Cranberries can be harvested wet, when a bog is flooded with water a few inches over the vines and a machine is driven through the bog to free the berries from the vine.  The berries float to the top and are taken out of the water.  95% of all cranberries are wet harvested and used for processed products like juice and cranberry sauce.  Dry harvesting is a process that uses machinery to pull the berries from the vine and prune the plants at the same time.  Dry harvested cranberries are the ones you buy in the bag at Thanksgiving.
Pictured here is the equipment used in harvesting.

Now you know why I want to stick my head in a gopher hole!