got cranberries?

Freshly plucked (well, actually sucked) from the bog, Michigan cranberries make their first appearance at Yellow Door this Thursday. Dawn is whipping up some cranberry bread pudding, which will surely be delightful. Tis the season after all -- cranberries are mostly harvested in October.

Interestingly, Michigan's cranberry crop is now puny compared to, across the big lake, Wisconsin. We have just over 300 acres of cranberries on six farms, including the largest in Cheboygan, the oldest in the U.P. and at blueberry farm DeGrandchamp in South Haven -- where our featured cranberries were grown in a handful of 4-acre trenches. (Wisconsin's acreage? More than 17,000!) Back in the 1800s, Michigan had "tens of thousands" of acres of wild cranberries. Darn those developers and lumberjacks!

Related to the blueberry, cranberries offer a ton of healthy goodness and are among the only three fruits native to North America. (This statement is mostly true.) The other two fruits are blueberries and concord grapes.

Read this Detroit News article for more info on Michigan's cranberry industry.