5/8/2026

this time of year is always a bit of a challenge for me to organize in my brain. oddly, muscling all the oysters up off the bottom and re-rigging them with floats is the easy part. that happened last month. now, all of the gear that i used to carry oysters ashore during winter harvests has to get cleaned and fixed up and brought back out to the farm, and all of the smaller oysters have to get divided as evenly as possible back out into that spare gear. while i do this i'm cycling the dirty winter gear up for a couple days of air drying before putting it right back to use too - it's a lot to keep track of! i'm also harvesting continuously, so in between these projects there's the usual culling and counting and prepping for that.

while i'm not increasing the number of oysters i'm growing each year, i am planning to set a couple new moorings to add more lines and gear so that i can spread things out a little more thinly than usual, something i'm hoping will make things easier on my back a little later in the season when everything is growing and getting huge and heavy. i also find that fewer oysters per bag tends to translate pretty clearly to more uniform, round, sturdy-shelled oysters. running a farm is always a big experiment!