John Harker has always liked fruit and always liked farmers.
That brought him to Maine in 1980, and unexpectedly brought him to cranberries — the development and tending of which would shape his career.
The Mt. Vernon man led the introduction of cranberry growing to home gardeners across the country. He was a key player in developing Maine’s small commercial industry and created the first commercially available white cranberry plant from a cutting found on a wild bog on the island of Vinalhaven.
His work opened a new agricultural venture to the state for farmers to diversify, brought a new opportunity for home food production across the country and revealed the diversity of one of Maine’s native fruits — even as the state’s commercial market peaked and then declined.
“It’s been a really neat little crop to grow,” he said. “It’s been fun growing it, and we’ve had a lot of fun with it.”
A 3-by-5-foot plot will yield about three pounds, the equivalent of five fresh bags from the supermarket. It may not save much money to grow cranberries at home, but they provide bragging rights at Thanksgiving and add a little more self-reliance, Harker said.
Cranberries grow in the wild in wet, sandy areas from Canada to Tennessee and into the northern Midwest.
Long before Harker brought them to backyards and commercial bogs here, they were first cultivated in English estate gardens in the 1700s from a sample sent back across the Atlantic Ocean from a trip gathering botanical samples, according to his research.
But the knowledge didn’t transfer back to the Americas, where commercial production was underway by 1816. A Cape Cod farmer had observed that his cranberry plants became more productive when covered with sand from the dunes and turned that into a farming technique. Massachusetts’ “cranberry fever” quickly scaled up into large commercial bogs, selling berries to sailors to help prevent scurvy among other uses.
Commercial growing also spread up to Maine, popular among dairy farmers with low-lying fields. Harker has found remnants of them from Alfred to Calais.
But the state had no commercial production by the start of the 1990s, when cranberries came across his radar as he worked for the state to help develop new crop opportunities.
A grower from Massachusetts wanted help setting up a bog here amid a boom time in the cranberry industry, which blossomed into a “major development” in Maine, Harker said.
Technology to dry cranberries had just hit the market, juice was popular and research about their health benefits helped fuel “exploding” demand.
And Maine was well-suited for it, especially its wild blueberry fields in Hancock and Washington counties, where two of the major processors expanded for a time into juice production.
Commercial bogs mimic wild conditions with peat moss and sandy soil and are built so they can be flooded and drained — once so water will freeze over the plants to protect them in winter, sometimes in the spring for insect control, and during the fall harvest if the berries are being picked for juice. Berries sold fresh are raked dry with mechanical harvesters, similar to wild blueberries.
By around 1998, cranberry production peaked at about 200 acres statewide, a tenth of what Harker and his state coworkers had hoped to achieve.
But other states had gotten in on the boom too, and bog construction was expensive. By the end of the decade, the market collapsed. Some small growers stuck with their bogs, and today most grow for the fresh market.
Twenty-five Maine farms were growing cranberries in 2022, according to the latest agricultural census, eight more than in 2017. But production dropped in the last 15 years from an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 100-pound barrels to around 5,000 in 2024, according to reports to the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. The state’s largest grower stopped producing a decade ago, the university noted.
All along, Harker and his wife, Deb, were experimenting in their own three-quarter-acre bog at home. His training had taught him that to teach someone how to grow something, he should know what he was talking about.
Harker started thinking about home growers, too, and developed potted cranberries for garden transplanting in the late 1990s that he sent out with informational packets.
At the time, only one or two other growers in the country were selling cranberries to gardeners — more like ‘twigs’ than his larger plants that were ready to produce fruit in the first year.
His business took off among adventurous gardeners, and he later took on a friend’s account selling cranberries to Maine-based seed company Fedco.
“Nobody had any information out there at all,” Harker said. “…It was really us who started the whole concept of trying to do it in the home garden.”
He had also crisscrossed the state exploring its many wild bogs in search of varieties that might be better adapted to production in Maine.
He collected more than 500 types to plant and experiment with in his home research bog: pear-shaped, dark purple, bright red, and in one case, off a friend’s tip, a rare white berry from a wild bog on Vinalhaven.
“There’s so much variability out there, so much variety,” he said. “It’s fascinating.”
That white fruit, likely caused by a genetic mutation, seemed to have potential for the home garden market, where white strawberries had recently been introduced. So Harker started working on breeding it and building up stock and, several years ago, the Blushing Moon white berry hit the market.
It’s white with a red tinge, with more meat and slightly less acidity than a typical berry.
A chance use of a potted plant for a Thanksgiving centerpiece led to another line of business supplying cranberry floral arrangements all over the country and a florist market in Boston with decorative cranberries, where the albino choice proved especially popular for arrangements between fall and winter.
The Harkers have been slowly winding down their business, Cranberry Creations, into retirement. While the future of the florist supply venture is sorted out, he’s hoping to find someone to take on the part of the business that supplies Fedco.
Looking back on his career — and his decades in cranberries — Harker would like to think of himself as an “idea guy” and an advocate for farmers who helped them stay in the business, he said, and added that education is critical to do so.
