What Should a Ripe Cranberry Feel Like?

Firmness

• Completely ripe cranberries should be firm and without any soft spots. Avoid fruits with soft spots as their quality is reduced. Remove those from the plant to keep pests from getting them. As they ripen, cranberries turn from white to red. The fully firm, ripe cranberries will be dark red and have brown seeds inside. Leave to ripen any berries that still have white on them.

Bounce

• When harvesting fully red cranberries, sacrifice one to conduct a bounce test. The berry should bounce when dropped on a flat, hard surface. Growers even use the bounce test on commercially harvested cranberries to grade them for selling as fresh fruit. Cranberries contain air instead of juice inside their hard exteriors, which helps them to bounce because their construction is vaguely similar to a tennis ball.

Float

• The air inside cranberries relates to another tactile test for ripeness -- whether the berries float. Ripe cranberries will float. Commercial growers flood their fields to create bogs. A machine loosens the cranberries from the bushes, which causes the ripe ones to float to the top where they are harvested. If you test your berries by floating them in water, dry them thoroughly because cranberries exposed to water or stored in water are more likely to decay from fungal sources or rot quicker.

Harvesting

• When you notice the cranberries turn red, feel them and conduct the bounce or float test on one or two to verify ripeness before picking the rest of the same shade of red. Do not leave the fruit on the plant during a frost because the cold weather below 30 degrees Fahrenheit may damage the fruit. For early-season frosts that occur before the cranberries are ripe, protect the fruit by covering the plant with a blanket or frost cover. When you do harvest them by hand in your garden, just pluck the dark red cranberries from the plant. With a healthy set of cranberry plants, you can expect a yield of 1 pound of cranberries for every square foot of plantings, depending on the density of your plantings.

Storage

• Your ripe cranberries will stay fresh for several weeks in the refrigerator if you keep them cool and dry. For longer storage, freeze the cranberries or prepare cranberry sauce and can it in a water bath canner. Plastic zippered freezer bags are the best containers for refrigerating or freezing cranberries. Keep the berries in the refrigerator for up to four weeks or freeze them in a plastic bag for up to a year, which will last you until next year's cranberry harvest. When you use the frozen berries, do not thaw them. Just use the frozen berries the same way you would use fresh cranberries.