In the six plus months that we have lived here in the Keeper's Cottage we have seen people come and gather seaweed for their gardens. I guess I had heard that it had remarkable properties as a fertilizer and a mulch but recently I have seen a devotion to it that is off the chart.
The gentleman in the photographs comes from Stoughton and twice he has arrived by the side of the cottage to gather seaweed from the ocean side beach. He has worked like a whirlwind and I sent Haley out on a photojournalistic mission to capture that effort.
This stuff must be something for him to work so hard at it. He has to have hauled away close to 500 pounds of it.
On his most recent visit last week he asked to borrow a pail in order to gather periwinkles for his wife. He told us she would cook them in a garlic broth and eat them with a pin. Who knew?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and observations with us! My family used to gather the periwinkles by the lighthouse and Sand Hills, and we'd eat them with the pin as well. It's a lot of work for a little meat. We stopped collecting them around 15 years ago, though, because of pollution concerns. Do you think they're safe now?
ReplyDeleteRight now I wouldn't risk it - the beach out front was closed briefly as the summer closed out and at a very low tide a neon green algae appears on the flat. You were smart to consider the pollution - I don't know that you can cook it away.
ReplyDeleteWe were just in this place a few weekends ago and I was thinking the same exact thing regarding the abundance of seaweeds by the beach. I wish we could have gotten our 500 lbs worth of it for our vegatble garden also but it was not the case. This is a really beautiful historic place and we enjoyed our brief time here soaking in the ambiance. We have a goal to visit as many lighthouses in and around New England for the summer. I believe this was our 12th one and it's great that these type of places are being maintained and preserved for future generations to come. It's very educational and I think it's an important link to the past and a treasure for the present.
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