Harvest Moon – Harvest Tide
Denise: Monday’s equinoxal full harvest moon meant a huge ‘spring’ tide, and ideal conditions to harvest the greatest variety and abundance of nature’s marine goodness. Three days later, the tidal range is still considerable, and we’ve been down on our own beach exploring. Tilly has been on forward patrol, J watching our rear (with the camera – also watching out for customers coming to the walled garden and finding no-one at home!) and carrying stuff. Here’s me giving a trimming the pile on a shaggy carpet of pepper dulse (it’s very small and fiddly!). We also came home with about about 4oz (dried weight) of carrageen – nestled amongs some of which were sea-anemone with their arms waving about! The stones here are painted vivid colours with some kind of submarine algae or lichen – I really don’t know what it is – which is quite startling through the shallow water. Back home in the kitchen, we started the long drying of the carageen for use in deserts (recipes another time), the pepper dulse as a seasoning, and some sugar kelp for casseroles (par-boil first, then add to the casserole when it goes in to the oven).
In fact we’ve now found you don’t need to pre-boil the sugar kep if it’s going into a casserole. We’ll try something similar with other seaweeds.