Island Artisans – Yellow Point Cranberry Farm

You probably don’t want to hear this because you’re already wondering where September went, but Thanksgiving is just around the corner!  And with every turkey dinner there is no doubt a pot of something cranberry on the table. Most of our cranberries come from farms in BC’s Lower Mainland or even the eastern United States, but there is a cranberry farm right here on Vancouver Island busy pumping out fresh and processed cranberries.

From a distance Yellow Point Cranberries near Ladysmith just looks like a flat, green field. The plants are not very tall. But at this time of year when you walk right into the field you look down and you see all these red berries hidden within the little bushes, and the foliage starts to turn to a cranberry colour as well. 

BC's huge cranberry farms are found in places like Richmond and Delta, but Yellow Point Cranberry Farm owner Grant Keefer says he and his wife started this smaller farm on Vancouver Island because of his childhood. "Cranberry farming is in my blood, my parents operate a larger piece of farmland in the Fraser River delta, and when we moved to Vancouver Island about 8 years ago we found a piece of land that was perfect for cranberry farming, so we did what just comes naturally to me."
But there is much more to the farm than the fields of cranberries.  The Keefers produce about 20 different cranberry products in a commercial kitchen on the farm they sell in their cute little retail shop called the Cranberry Cottage. The cranberry salsa, cranberry horseradish jelly, and cranberry amaretto peach butter are all very tasty, and they even sell a little bottle filled with dried cranberries, sugar chunks and other flavourings to which you add your own liquor, like vodka, to make your own cranberry liqueur.

Right now you can do a self-guided tour to the demonstration field Grant built, poke your head into the kitchen, stand outside the cleaning and packaging line and watch some processing and of course finish up in the gift shop.

The ‘dry harvesting’ takes place first at the farm. They use a motorized ‘comb’ device that plucks the berries off the bushes and keeps them in pretty good shape, and most of that fruit is sold as fresh cranberries.  Later in October Grant will flood the fields, go through them with motorized beaters that knock the berries off, then raise the water level even further so that the berries float to the top of the water, then they get boomed to one end and pumped into containers that are sent to the Ocean Spray processing plant to be turned into juice or sweetened, dried cranberries.

If you can't get out to Yellow Point, the good news is that they do offer mail order of their products, and eventually they want to have them available in other retail locations up and down the island.  They also do a few farmers' markets up and down island selling fresh cranberries for Thanksgiving.  He notes that they want to be careful with expansion. "We don't want to get too big," he says. "We just want people to be able to come out and visit the farm, learn about cranberries and of course try some of our fabulous cranberry products."

You should also check out the website for the Cedar-Yellow Point Artisan Association for news of their Christmas tour and other great attractions like McNab's Corn Maze.