There's a Bog in My Backyard

"So you like an adventure," the friendly guy at the landscaping materials place said to me last week as I paid for a half a yard of sand and explained my project. He loaded my small pickup with a scant scoop and stopped to ask if I could handle more. "Sure," I nodded. My husband had put heavy-duty springs on the shocks so we could carry heavier loads. I heard a little scrape as I drove out of the bumpy yard. "Just the mud flaps," I told myself until I pulled out onto the street and the dragging sound rose to a high-pitched screech. It didn't sound like mud flaps. I stopped at the bank and looked under the truck. Nothing appeared to be touching the ground. I drove home at about 35 m.p.h. and hoped I wasn't irreparably damaging our poor, rusty 16-year old truck. Yeah, I like an adventure. The truck made it home, and I never did tell my husband.

One of the problems with ordering seeds and plants in February is that in the euphoria that comes with imagining all of the things you will eat from your garden and all the things that will bloom outside your door, you are tempted into buying the exotic and the unusual. Almost two weeks ago, a large box arrived with the UPS driver and I couldn't figure out what it could be. Too big for the sweet potatoes. How many buckwheat seeds did I order? As I opened the box, I saw lovely, dark red and green boxwood-sized leaves, and an instruction sheet on "Growing Cranberries." I was surprised, but excited. We drink cranberry juice almost exclusively at our house, and I relish (pun intended) making homemade sauce every Thanksgiving. I remember a family trip to New England when I was a child and we visited Ocean Spray Cranberry World in Plymouth. My fascination with the harvester foreshadowed my career in farm history. What fun!

Later that night, I saw my experienced gardener-friend Jim and told him excitedly, "I'm going to plant cranberries!" He looked at me a little skeptically, "Don't you have to plant those in a bog?" I had done some research, so I said, "No, I think they just grow them in low-lying areas to flood the area and make the harvest easier." Jim appeared to have full confidence that I knew what I was doing. That night, I sat down after the kids went to bed to read the planting instructions. "Replace soil with a 50/50 mixture of peat moss and coarse, sharp sand." Replace? Dig out the soil? "Add bonemeal, bloodmeal, Epsom salts and rock phosphate to the mixture and mix in well." What the heck is rock phosphate (I'm still not sure, I read that I could substitute bonemeal, so that's what I did)?

I bought the peat the next day. The next three days it rained, which might explain why by the time I picked up the sand it was twice as heavy--it was water-logged. I found my soil additives and took a trip to the pharmacy to find Epsom salts. Then, I set about building a raised bed; I was not about to dig a 4 x 4-foot 6-inch hole. I have developed what I think is a pretty easy technique for building raised beds after some experimenting. The materials include joist hangers for 2 x 6 lumber (less than $1) and 2 x 8-inch untreated boards. Whenever possible, I try to reuse old lumber, and we had a few pieces left from a garage renovation that provided my two beds for lettuce earlier this spring.

I thought I had the lumber and joist hangers on hand. Turns out, the hangers were too big and the lumber was only 2 x 6. Nevertheless, I cut two pieces of what I had to size with the circular saw and borrowed a couple of larger boards from the pallets we stack our firewood on. I gathered all of the parts and prepared to drill, only to find my husband had taken the drill to work that day. With the schoolbus due at any moment, I gave up. The next day, Carl helped me get the frame together and helped me shovel the sand as I layered in peat. There was enough sand to fill the raised bed, the sandbox and make a pile about the same size under our pine trees.

I "mixed" the peat, sand and soil amendments together as best I could, and wet it down. Did I mention that peat absorbs water about as well as asphalt? Can anything grow in this? My daughter's friend arrived to play. He has grandparents in Maine. His Mom admired the garden and asked what I was planting. "Cranberries," I admitted, not so confidently. "You can grow those around here?" I sighed. "You sure do like to experiment," she said. A costly and time-consuming experiment, perhaps.

So goes the first chapter in the saga of The Cranberry Experiment. Only time will tell if it will follow the same course as the Great Pea Failure of 2008.

© 2008 Jenifer Dolde