Cranberry and Apples

We continue our journey from Quebec to Montreal and visit the Cranberry Festival along the way. Here, we booked the English tour and were more or less alone with the guide. We first took a school bus to the cranberry field and there we were able to switch to a tractor trailer. Our guide told us a lot and we were also allowed to taste cranberries, but this is a very sour affair. They look tempting red but are really very sour in their unprocessed state. We drove along the fields with the tractor and saw harvested, flooded and still ripening plants. The plant resembles our heather.

The fields are flooded with water for harvesting, which is passed from field to field. The berries are then sucked off within 24 hours. To make all the berries float to the top, a special comb is used to go through the plants.

At the end of the tour, you visit a small market, where you can taste how delicious cranberries are after processing.

Just before Montreal, we are on the tractor for the second time today and pick fresh apples from the plantation. Here, we also take pumpkins and corn cobs, following Canadian tradition.