Wild cranberries thrive in low fields, meadows, bogs, and stream banks, and Native Americans used them for food, medicine, and dyes while also giving them to the first European settlers as a sign of peace. Two centuries later, growers began cultivating cranberries in the bogs of New Jersey’s Pinelands, improving the plants’ hardiness and commercial potential until nearly all of the state’s commercially grown cranberries came from the region. Successful cultivation depends on moist bog soil, a reliable source of clean water, a layer of sand over the soil, and irrigation ditches to hold water during dry seasons and drain it during unusually wet ones. During the 1860-70s, New Jersey ranked first in commercial cranberry production, and today it ranks third. The once-disdained bogs of the Pine Barrens became the basis of one of New Jersey’s multi-million dollar industries, and the fruit itself was first called the crane-berry because European settlers thought its stems and flowers resembled a crane’s neck, head, and bill. A network of dams, dikes, and ditches lets farmers control water levels, and since the mid-1960’s growers have used wet harvesting by flooding ripe bogs in the fall so floating berries can be loosened by mechanical beaters and guided by workers into conveyors and crates.