Oyster Blog — Oysters

The camera caught up with Adam and Louie wandering through the single oyster pens one blindingly-sunny day in late March. It was the first daylight low tide of the season. Hello there! Finding an oyster to sample wasn't terribly difficult. Adam opens the oyster and eats it while Louie looks on in approval.

The ideal oyster is cup-shaped with a wide, fluted edge tapering towards the hinge. Healthy, growing oysters are very fluted and frequently very colorful, whereas an oyster that's starting to atrophy will have rounded, colorless edges. The oyster above was one of three dozen in a package we shipped to California yesterday. In our humble opinion, April is the friendliest oyster month: the water is still cold enough so that the oyster meat is really firm, but it's starting to warm up just enough to let them feed and grow. These are amazingly beautiful, right? Even to people who aren't...

The stork recently dropped off a crate of oyster seed from a California hatchery. Here's a handful of them:     Jose and Cleo spent an afternoon putting the babies into grow-out bags:     which will protect the seed from predators such as snails and crab. The bags were strung together and then placed out on the beach. In 3 months, the oysters will be big enough to face life on the beach without the protection of the bags. And after another 2 years or so, the oysters will be big enough to hit the market as beautiful, and...

Pacific oysters can grow really, really big if left to their own devices. We keep this monster oyster shell in our store to show to interested customers. It also goes on tour with us occasionally...down to Portland to decorate our booth at the NW Food and Wine Festival...over to Seattle for one of the numerous oyster events we participate in. Barnacles close-up Oyster tree-rings In a later post we'll talk about oyster predators... one of which makes oysters develop the pock-marked pattern shown above. Piggy-back oyster. T.J. and Jean Hsu, visiting from Texas, stopped by to take a tour of...

  According to the Principia Cybernetica Project's definition of happiness, happy people are characterized by the belief that they are able to control their situation, whereas unhappy people tend to believe that they are a toy of fate. Yet another reason to associate clams with happiness: clams, unlike oysters, can move when they're feeling crowded, bored, threatened by a moon snail, or fed-up with their neighbors. They use their foot:   to drag themselves across the tideflats and to dig a new hole. As you walk across the beach you can see little trails in the sand where a clam...