It's fascinating how certain plants become fashionable. Last year, it was all retro stuff like rhubarb and gooseberries; right now, every foodie magazine you pick up has recipes that call for cranberries.
Until this summer I'd thought of them purely as something Americans made into jelly to eat with turkey.Then I found a Christmas cake recipe that had cranberries and pistachios in it and, since I don't like fruit mince, I made it, using dried cranberries. It was fabulous, and so it should have been since the ingredients cost more than the wine we'd bought for Christmas dinner. So I'm on a mission to grow cranberries before next Christmas so we can afford the cake and the wine.
I'm talking about real cranberries here, not the Chilean guava shrub which is being touted as the 'New Zealand cranberry'. The real cranberry is an evergreen trailing vine.
In cooler areas of the Northern Hemisphere cranberries grow in bogs and you see ponds and lakes covered in scarlet fruit. But if you don't happen to have a bog, don't despair. We can grow cranberries here and they're being grown commercially on the South Island's west coast. They like sun but will tolerate some shade, they're wind tolerant, heat tolerant and cold tolerant, and they don't even want feeding - nutrient-poor soil is fine. And for some obscure reason, bugs don't seem to like them so pest control is not a major issue.
The berries are high in anti-oxidants and other natural compounds and they're a good source of Vitamin A and C. Recent scientific research shows they have significant amounts of antioxidants and other phytonutrients that may help protect against heart disease, cancer and other diseases.
To prepare a bed for them, mulch heavily with bark or sawdust to reduce weeds and keep the soil acidic. They'll tolerate wet or flooded soils but good drainage is required during the active growing season for proper root growth and function.
They don't like weeds and they certainly don't like to be dry, but that's about it. Fruit is borne on the previous year's growth and apart from reducing tangles to encourage strong dense growth, very little trimming or pruning is needed. A near-perfect little plant.
Evidently, a bed of about a square metre should yield up to a kilogramme of fruit in the third or fourth year, which will be enough for my Christmas cake - just not this year.
