You may have seen the Ocean Spray cranberry commercials with farmers wearing waders up to their armpits while standing in a sea of floating cranberries. I've always just assumed the berries grow in water. Actually, they grow on lowbushes (woody, perennial vines) in bogs, which are beds layered with sand, peat and gravel. When the cranberries are ready to harvest for canning and juicing, farmers flood the bogs up to 18" in water (known as wet harvesting) and and use special equipment to loosen the berries from the vines. The ripe berries float to the surface and are scooped up and loaded onto trucks. Fresh cranberries, like the kind we buy bagged in the produce section at grocery stores during the fall, are harvested using a dry method. It's considered the best way to get the freshest of berries. Cranberry farmers use a mechanical picker that looks like a large lawnmower with metal teeth. The picker combs berries off the vine and deposits them in burlap sacks.