Oysters on Block Island
Jul 14th, 2008 | By Hank Shaw | Category: Fish, Out & About | Comments | 6 Comments |
After more than a year, my article on a little oyster farm on Block Island has finally published in Edible Rhody, which is to Rhode Island what Edible Sacramento is to our city. Holly and I had a blast reporting this story, and the owner of Sun Farm Oysters, Chris Warfel, as well as his trusty sidekick Jessica Veldman, were great people and fun to share a beer with afterwards.
Another piece I wrote from my Block Island trip was about foraging for quahogs — hard-shelled clams. That article has just come out in the magazine Art of Eating. You’ll have to go buy that one, because they don’t reprint their articles online. But it’s in the current issue on stands now.
Farming oysters and clams is nothing like farming salmon, which can be devastating to the environment. Shellfish farms actually clean the area’s water and most are more like hatchery operations than true farms, because the baby clams, called spat, are tossed in with the natives and they live side by side on the bottom. Warfel’s oyster farm is more protected, however, and the picture above is of Jessica turning mesh bags with oysters in them — they need to be cleared of icky stuff every so often.
Among the icky stuff are odd little creatures that wave their arms to catch floating yummy bits of flotsam. Or is it jetsam? Here’s one of them:
At any rate, I hope you like the article. And aren’t Holly’s photos great?
In “Bottomfeeder,” which I highly recommend, Taras Grescoe talks about how oyster farming could help clean up Chesapeake Bay–yet traditionalists like the “watermen” are against it for the usual age-old reasons. My state of WA has a bunch of successful oyster farms…though I usually roll my own.
Yeah, the pics are great!
We like to spend our weekends in a place called Delta del Ebro in south Catalonia, Spain. It’s the mouth of a big river and there’s also an oysters and mussels farming there, we know that they filter the water and our palate also knows how gooooooood they are
. However, I cannot eat them raw.
Great pics, and great article too! I hope Warfel sticks with it, sounds like a tough life. A good friend grew up summering on BI and her eight-nine year old grandmother still lives there with her huge garden and old asparagus patch. My friend knows just where this farm is and will seek out a few (or more) of the oysters on her visit next month.
Finspot: I know several of those watermen and know just how crabby they can be. I covered the attempts to introduce gigas oysters in the Chesapeake in the late 1990s as a newspaper reporter. What a fiasco.
Audrey: Just heard from Warfel — he is indeed making a go of it! He just added another solar-powered upweller to raise baby oysters.
I keep wondering if zebra mussels are any good to eat. They’re certainly plentiful. Thanks for reminding us about farmed seafood – it’s becoming a bit of a hot topic.
It’s great to hear that Warfel is surviving — and doing so with solar technology. How very cool.