What Is a Cranberry? A Detailed Guide to Growing Techniques

Cranberry, also known as lingonberry, is a fruit with high edible value. In recent years it has become quite popular both at home and abroad, and many people like to use it to make cookies. So what is a cranberry? What are the growing techniques?

1. What is a cranberry?

1. The cranberry is an evergreen shrub of the order Ericales, family Ericaceae, genus Vaccinium, subgenus Oxycoccus. It is a small round red berry that grows on low vines. Its leaves are oblong or long ovate, with pointed tips and bases, a shallow heart-shaped base, no hairs on the underside and a yellowish-brown color there, and a grayish-green upper surface. Its flowers are triangular-ovate, with a yellowish-white short bell-shaped corolla, and its fruit is a purplish-red sphere. It generally flowers from September to October and fruits from November to August of the following year.

2. The cranberry is a fruit with very high nutritional value. It is rich in nutrients such as vitamin C, pectin and anthocyanins, and has the effects of beautifying the skin, detoxifying, lowering blood pressure and protecting the cardiovascular system. Regular consumption can beautify and care for the skin and help prevent gastric cancer, Alzheimer's disease, high blood pressure and other diseases. However, because it does not keep well, it can be made into juice, capsules, dried cranberries and so on.

3. The cranberry is a fairly common fruit in mainland China. It originated in the Americas, and together with the blueberry and the Concord grape it is one of the three specialty fruits of the United States, enjoying the reputation of “North American ruby”. At present it is also fairly common in the Greater Khingan Mountains region of China, where it is called northern red bean. However, cranberries produced in Chile have the purest taste, so that country is the main source of supply for China.

2. What growing techniques are there for cranberries?

1. Soil selection: what kind of land is suitable for growing them?

Cranberries have high soil requirements. Generally, the soil surface needs to have a layer of sand about 5cm deep before they can be grown, so peat soil is the best choice.

2. Seed selection: which variety is good to choose?

There are many cranberry varieties, and most of them were developed from wild ones, so when selecting seeds, simply choose varieties with good quality and stable yields to grow.

3. Planting method: how do you plant them?

Cut off part of the cranberry's vine stems, then bury them in the soil, and finally water them. After a period of time, new plants will grow.

4. Field management techniques: how do you manage them?

(1) Pollination: although cranberries can pollinate themselves, the yield after self-pollination is very low, so they can be pollinated by hand to increase the yield.

(2) Reasonable watering: cranberries have high water requirements, and the soil simply needs to be kept moist at all times, so during cultivation there must be sufficient water. But when the frost season comes, good insulation measures must be taken to prevent them from freezing to death.

5. Harvesting: when is the best time to harvest?

Once the cranberries are ripe, they can be harvested by machine. There are two methods here: water harvesting and dry harvesting. Water harvesting means flooding the field with a lot of water on the evening before the harvest, submerging the cranberries so the fruit floats on the water, and then the next day using water reels to knock the fruit off and collect it. Dry harvesting does not need so much water; it can basically be said to be grown dry, and the fruit is simply picked once it is ripe.

The above is a detailed introduction to what a cranberry is and its growing techniques. We hope it is helpful to everyone.