American Cranberry

Vaccinium macrocarpon Seeds per pack ~ 25 BOTANICAL SAMPLE  (Packed for 2025) Cranberries have crept along in acidic soils in North America since long before humans arrived to appreciate them. Native Americans harvested them by hand and dried them for future use. European settlers fashioned wooden scoops to harvest the berries. Since the 1960s, most berries have been "wet harvested" by flooding cranberry fields, knocking off berries with special machinery, then harvesting the berries that float to the surface (because hand-harvesting is so taxing, with the berries growing only a few inches above the ground on clump-forming often evergreen sub-shrubs). A woman in New Jersey in the early 20th century, Elizabeth Coleman White, domesticated the related blueberry at her family's cranberry farm in Whitesbog, NJ, while another Elizabeth, Elizabeth Lee, invented and popularized "Cranberry Sauce" from her farm in New Egypt, NJ, and was one of three founding members of the Ocean Spray cooperati