Oyster Blog — Farm work

We're hitting new milestones in our oyster husbandry abilities. This spring, we set up a Floating Upwelling System, which people in the industry call a Flupsy, as well as a downwelling system, which no one but us calls Dupsy. The Flupsy and Dupsy are pumping systems that continually move salt water through silos filled with oyster or clam seed. They provide a safe place where we can fatten shellfish seed quickly before putting it out in the wild, where it will face all sorts of hungry predators. As long as we've been able to, we've purchased seed from hatcheries to...

It's hard to tumble when you're all tied up in knots: Darn mussels have invaded our tumble bags, using their byssal threads to attach everything up into one big messy mass. After spending several hours trying to go through the bags by hand, removing all the mussels, we've decided to just dump the mussel mess out on the beach. The mussels will die in the intertidal beach, and the oysters will have to come to terms with the fact that they're now going to be beach grown, not tumbled.

Here are some photos from our barge ride last week with Urban Farmer.  The weather was perfect for a short little jaunt out on the Canal... we took some time to liberate a bucket of sea creatures that had been stranded on the shucking table, met Lefty, the injured seagull who always hitches a ride on the barge to eat similarly stranded sea creatures, and watched as Adam pulled in a few tubs. And then, later in the week, we saw a really pretty moonrise. N.B. safety mongers: while we did provide life jackets to everyone on the boat, nobody took us up...

Oyster Adam  (second from Left) with Guster's Luke, Ryan & Adam Oyster Farmers: For a couple of months Adam and oyster fan have been plotting ways to share the Hama Hama experience with our customers. It's tricky this time of year because the tides are low at night and the weather is generally miserable, but we knew all we needed was the right angle: We had to make sure whoever showed up was prepared and willing to get wet and muddy, stand in the wind, and stay up to all hours of the night in search of fresh oysters. We...

In no particular order, here are the top 12 most memorable moments from 2010, as seen on the Hama Hama Farm. 1. Creating a tumble farm, so that we can offer boutique tumbled oysters to some of our higher-end clients. 2. Spring & Summer Open Farm Days, where we invite the public onto our beach to learn about oyster culture and harvest their own shellfish. This year we had about a hundred people show up in March (when it was sunny) about 10 people show up in April (when it poured) and about 150 arrive in May (when it was...