Cranberries in the wild

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

Cool fall air, colourful leaves on a sunny day and the smell of a turkey in the oven....

You need cranberries!

If you’re looking for a fun fall activity that doesn’t involve pumpkins or apples, consider picking your own cranberries in Avard Brydon’s wild u-pick patch on the mountain. “My father, Rupert, planted these back in the 1930s - he gathered the vines from a swamp on the Brow Mountain Road, and we all had to help clear the land and then poke the vines down in with sticks.”

The West Black Rock Road patch was a new venture at the time, a farmer’s attempt at an innovative cash crop with a good price. “We kids loved it,” Brydon says. “It meant an extra three or four weeks out of school in the fall and a chance to make a little money. Pa would gather us all up and we’d pick - I’d make a dollar a day: that was 20 quarts, but I was slow, too careful. What Pa said, we did!”

Rupert Brydon wanted his 100 barrels of cranberries to fetch a good price from the local buyer, and they’d eventually end up in Montreal. He built a dam to help hold water, used to cover the patch for winter protection, and he put in a sprinkler system to limit frost damage. Avard Brydon remembers being out late on fall nights keeping wet hay burning around the patch: smudge fires to keep off the frost. “They didn’t work very well.”

In the 1950s, the cranberry market price halved, and the Brydons’ patch went out of production. They mowed it off for hay, close to the ground and cutting off the cranberry vines.

Brydon grew up and ended up working at the Kentville research station in berry crops, even planting a cranberry cultivar on the old Bezanson & Chase bog in Aylesford, now run by the Johnstons. Ten years ago, he took on the farm in West Black Rock Road and, five or six years ago, realized the cranberries were still there. “We started leaving the hay a little longer, and the cranberries are growing.”

He looks at it as a potential niche crop now: “Just small, natural, growing wild.... “A few people know it’s here, and word gets out. If people are thinking they’re losing touch with the reality of food, this is fun and educational.”

If you want to pick your own, just call Brydon. The cranberries are ready for picking and will last through October if the frost holds off.