Bold Coast Harvest
Wild-grown seaweed has a short, fickle window for harvest, and Kacie Loparto, a seaweed expert with years of bicoastal experience harvesting wild species, knows this all too well. After the winter growing season, wild-species need to be harvested before they get too woody and muciliginous with the warmer ocean temps and sun. Logistically, this means finding appropriate tidal windows for foraging before spring is over: usually one three-or-four day stretch of exceptionally low tides—“drainers” they’re called, tides so low they drain out entire bays—in April and again in May. Those six to eight days of acceptable tides account for essentially all of the yearly harvest. Kacie led a group of volunteers, working in exchange for room and board at a farm in Pembroke, Maine, as they targeted Dulse, Nori, Winged Alaria, and other edible species along the shoreline. In a matter of days the seaweed was harvested, transported, sorted, weighed, hung to dry, and packaged by Kacie and her team.
