Rochester cranberry harvest is in full swing
Woody Hartley, surrounded by cranberries, talks to a group visiting the farm Thursday, Oct. 15. Photos by Grace Roche
Visitors can buy cranberries harvested on the property at the farm's gift shop. 
Several older pieces of dry harvesting equipment are displayed on the farm.
Harvesters use a similar piece of equipment to the one pictured here to pump cranberries out of the bog and into an awaiting truck. 
Cranberries float in the water. 
Editor Grace Roche dons waders before stepping into the bog.
Woody Hartley, surrounded by cranberries, talks to a group visiting the farm Thursday, Oct. 15. Photos by Grace Roche
Visitors can buy cranberries harvested on the property at the farm's gift shop.
Several older pieces of dry harvesting equipment are displayed on the farm.
Harvesters use a similar piece of equipment to the one pictured here to pump cranberries out of the bog and into an awaiting truck.
Cranberries float in the water.
Editor Grace Roche dons waders before stepping into the bog.
ROCHESTER — A ribbon of red streaks across a flooded bog, growing ever wider.
A machine drives in laps around the rectangular field, knocking ripe cranberries off the vine and sending them bobbing up to the water’s surface.
It’s the first step in the wet harvesting process at Hartley Family Farm, where the berries are grown, picked and shipped off to area processing facilities .
Co-owner Woody Hartley said this has been a pretty good year for the fruit, and many of the crops ripened around the time he hoped.
By mid October, he’s already overseen the harvest of two of the farm’s eight bogs, and said each one has produced about enough berries to fill a tractor trailer.
In previous years he and his brother and business partner Walter would enlist the help of family members to get the job done. Now that the grandkids are adults and have moved away from the farm, they contract a team to harvest instead.
Once the berries are off the plant, the bogs are flooded with another foot of water.
Harvesters then push the floating berries to the edge of the bog and corral them with a floating barrier. From there, a machine pumps the fruit into a large truck standing at the ready.
“Both phases are beautiful,” Hartley said. “Watching the machine go down knocking them off, it's very cool.”
The wet harvested fruit is sold to Fruit d'Or, a company that uses the crops to make juice, sauce or dried cranberries.
There are also two bogs that are dry harvested each year in a more labor-intensive hand picking process. These berries are sold fresh at area grocery stores or on the farm.
Hartley said he hopes the harvest will be finished by early next month, when he will start preparing to do it all again next year.
