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Cranbe y farming at Lynch Hi Farms

By Nancy English Phot s by Courntey Hammond and Anna Emerson

Of Lynch Hill Farms’ 200 acres, approximately 5.5 are devoted to growing cranberries. Courtney Hammond, the extended family’s
cranberry farmer, has mastered this demanding crop, grown in sand on top of beds of clay.

Along the way to responding to the weather and other uncontrollable phenomena that affect the cranberries, he developed a taste for
them. “I eat an obscene amount of cranberries, every day,” he said. The berries in his own crop are a uniform deep pink and dark red,
unlike the multi-hued crops you might see in a commercial harvest. That color is one thing, among others, that he has learned to deep-
en. And so is the sweetness – so don’t worry that he’s eating sour fruit! “By the end of the season the Brix count is almost as high as
the blueberries” he said. The Brix count measures fruit sweetness.

They are tart but sweeter than you might imagine, as I confirmed while writing this and snacking on cranberries. Ordered from the
farm in January, they had been stored for more than two months after harvest, but almost all were firm, crunchy, ringing with tangy
acidity. Fiber and Vitamin C augment the snack’s moral boost. And the proanthocyanidins seem to be the source of the berries’ pro-
tection against urinary tract infections. But the last word on their medicinal value await further research.

Lynch Hill Farms also cultivates wild blueberries and has developed a good reputation for its harvest of fresh tiny clean berries full of
flavor and all the nutrients they have become famous for. From the beginning of August to Labor Day, the Lynch Hill Farms blueberry
fields are carefully hand-raked, the berries distributed to local restaurants, with just a part of the crop brought to a blueberry processor
to freeze, and none of it mechanically harvested.

Starting Columbus Day, the cranberry fields take up the pickers labors, and the harvest extends through November.

Starting a cranberry field is painstaking work at the beginning, requiring hand-weeding until the vines, spread out and pressed down
into the bed, take root and become estab-
lished. But once the vines proliferate, the
weeds are naturally kept down. Cranber-
ries flower in July, Courtney said, and the
flower looks like a crane’s head, dropping
on vertical stems. The blossom starts pink
and gradually pales to white, the petals
drop and a small green fruit starts to swell
on the stem, with leaves just a quarter of an
inch long.
Courtney used a laser level to make sure
the underlying clay beds of each of the
cranberry beds were perfectly flat, because
any lower lying spots could allow fungus
to take hold of the ripe berries when they
are flooded in the fall to protect them from
early frosts. Five to six inches of sand are
Cranberries in early season, ripening in the sun. Photo by Courtney Hammond

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