Oyster Blog — Farm work

Whose idea was it to designate August 5th National Oyster Day? Is there an Australian prankster embedded in the Bureau of Obscure Food Holidays who's sabotaging our ability to truly celebrate our nation's most valuable bivalve? If you haven't already heard: August is an iffy month to consume raw oysters. They might make you sick, and they might be spawny.  But maybe August is a fantastic time to be an oyster? The water's warm, the sun's out, you and all your friends and neighbors are spawning, and there's less risk that you'll be harvested and eaten. Tomorrow we'll be celebrating...

It was a gorgeous sunny and clear day, not too hot, and the tide was low at 1 pm. The Brothers. Looking south down the canal. Judith, Sarah, Raquel, and Dave spent the day breaking apart bags of last year's cultch  and piling it on the barge. Later this week we'll move the cultch to a grow-out area. (Cultch = semi-crushed oyster shell covered with naturally-recruited oyster seed). Nearby, Dan and Dave were picking single oysters. Upstream in the picnic area two boys, upon discovering that our landscaping isn't quite level, turned one of the boards into a teeter-totter: Later...

Last week we received a certified letter from the Highway Department telling us that our tree cookie sign is illegal. Even though it's located on the same property as our store, it's too far from the store to satisfy the scenic byway highway requirements. To that we said boo. But after brainstorming several creative responses to the situation we decided the best bet was to just remove the offensive object. The sign, cut from a 400 year old Douglas fir tree, had been up since 2008. And, truth be told: the wood wasn't weathering very well. In its illegal and...

Saturday we trucked ourselves and a bunch of shellfish over to the first Saturday Bellevue Farmers Market of 2010. It was a beautiful and fun day at the market, and the smoked and pickled oysters went over like a helium balloon. So, from now until October, we'll be in Bellevue every Saturday hawking clams in the shell and oysters four different ways: smoked, pickled, shucked and in the shell. Come on by for a sample! www.bellevuefarmersmarket.org

A couple of months ago Adam pulled some seed out of a grow-bag and brought it into the store to shuck. The oysters had led sheltered lives... they hadn't yet been tumbled or tossed around on the beach, and so they had soft, brittle shells that broke into pieces when we shucked them. You might be upset if you ordered oysters in a restaurant and that mess arrived on your plate! The Hama Hama Oyster Mama was so strong in her twenties that she could twist an apple into two pieces. Now we're taking it a step further and opening...