The bug to farm oysters bites on beautiful summer days, when other bugs – greenflies, no-see-ums – aren’t in evidence. The water is calm, the sun is shining, and there are neat lines of oystering gear emerging from the water as the tide flows out. For miles, there’s nothing but harbor, spotted with eelgrass islands and bordered by a pristine barrier beach. Bucolic, only with boats.
It bit my husband Kevin, hard. His urge to farm dates back to the fourth grade, when Sister Cora asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. She thought Kevin was being a wiseass when he said farmer, and made him kneel on grains of rice for his insolence. But four decades later, when he met Les Hemmila, a veteran oysterman who took him out to see the Cape Cod oyster flats, it was all over but the backbreaking labor, uncertain income, and inevitable ruin by disease or mismanagement.
“How hard can it be?” I thought when Kevin brought it up. Farming oysters seemed easier than farming things with roots or legs. They eat what floats by. They’re impervious to bad weather. They can’t run away. And I sure wasn’t going to waste one of my three lifetime marital vetoes to stop him (ask him why he doesn’t have a motorcycle). We happened to be in the right place at the right time to get an oyster grant – a lease on a little section of seabed – and we were off and running. Ahead of the game, even, because we already had a boat.But really, picking a crop because you think it’s going to be low-maintenance is a good indication that you shouldn’t be farming in the first place. First, our boat. Boats, it turns out, are as specialized as farm equipment, and you can’t farm oysters with your 19-foot fishing boat any more than you can bale hay with your cotton gin.
Ideally, you want oyster flats to be in water shallow enough to go dry for a few hours at low tide, so you can get at your oysters more easily and let the sun kill the various aquatic life forms that foul the gear. But to get to those shallow spots, you need a flat-bottomed boat with a draft in inches. There went our already-have-a-boat advantage. We bought another boat, only to discover that it was too small to carry all the equipment. So, even though our driveway was getting crowded, we bought another, bigger one.Hey, if oyster farming doesn’t work out, we can always invade Britain.
by Tamar Haspel, Taste | Read more:
