LADYSMITH -- There will be enough cranberries to go around this Thanksgiving long weekend as island growers are seeing an above average harvest.
“There’s good fruit coming out. It’s coloured up nicely this year,” said Grant Keefer, owner of Yellow Point Cranberries in Ladysmith.
The cranberry farm is currently dry picking their fruit which will be used for this weekend and stored for the Christmas season.
Keefer says that the cranberries you see in the store or at farmers markets are all “dry picked.”
Yellow Point Cranberries sells an average of 90,000 kilograms of fruit per year and around 8,000 kilograms of that is fresh fruit.
There are approximately five to six cranberry farms on the island, from the Cowichan Valley to Campbell River, and Yellow Point is one of the only ones that picks fresh.
“We want people to eat more fresh cranberries and cook with them themselves,” said Keefer. “We are trying to move more towards fresh fruit and moving more of our volume in that area.”
Once dry picking is done, the process of flooding the fields will begin, which is expected to start at the end of the month. All the cranberries collected from the flooding process will be shipped and processed to make juices and sauces.
