The Annual Nantucket Cranberry Festival
The cranberry bogs are flooded with water for easy gathering.
Multiple generations sport their Nantucket Reds for the festival, keeping with the cranberry theme.
What is a Fall festival without giant pumpkins, petting zoos and relay races?
Even Jocelyn found some cranberry to boast.
Every October families travel from all over the country, sporting their cranberry colored Nantucket Red pants and overalls, to attend the annual Cranberry Festival on the tiny New England island of Nantucket. Most people know The Cape and Islands for their wealth of summer beaches and lobster rolls, but our favorite time of year is the fall. The sun is a golden yellow and the air is crisp and fresh. Fall is a peaceful time on the island and you feel like you have stumbled on a secret place that transports you to a time of innocence.
Most people don’t know that Nantucket has had an abundance of Cranberry Bogs since 1857 that are quietly tucked back in the center of the island. They produce 2 million pounds of cranberries a year. The Cranberry Festival kicks off the fall harvest. Here you learn that the bogs are flooded every year so the berries can float to the top. People then wade through the water and push all the cranberries to one end of the bog where machines collect them and carry them off to the nearby Ocean Spray facilities… That’s right… if you’ve had Ocean Spray cranberry juice, you’ve had Nantucket cranberries. Other festival highlights include the sheep shearing and herding demonstrations, tractor rides, kiddie relay races, farm animals and of course every type of food imaginable that you can fill with cranberries.
