Low Low Tides Seaweed Harvest Workshop: March
March 30 – April 3
Greenhorns and Smithereen Farm partner to offer educational seaweed harvest events. This is our seventh year of offering Low Low Tides Seaweed Programming.
These events are multi-day educational and social experiences; at dawn we teach you to harvest responsibly and process wild algae for culinary use. In the afternoon we host teachers for lectures, and there are delightful shared group meals for those who stay on.
Our purpose with this programming is to share our love of the seaweed and wild ecology of the inter-tide, to keep learning and to learn and work in an embodied community of practice. The teachers join us in the water. Kacie Loparto has been learning / teaching seaweed for more than 12 years. The teachers we have chosen reflect some of the areas we feel are important for seaweed stewardship- read on for the afternoon workshop descriptions.
For more information on our theory of change, please read the Seaweed Commons position paper and articles www.seaweedcommons.org. Our goal is to grow a vibrant community of care to protect our access, our coastal ecology and our beloved ocean.
Harvesters must register with the Low Low Tides 2025 — Registration Form, and must obtain proper licensing. (We’ll help!)
We hand-harvest from Cobscook Bay and the nearby Bold Coast. We dry in our greenhouses, for Smithereen Farm to process in for commercial, value-added products like seaweed sprinkle, salt, broth mix, bath soak, and newly added this year… kelp soap! We think that the beautiful and intense physical practice of seaweed wild harvest is a great time for those who are passionate and/or curious on this subject to come, in person, and expose their thinking to the cold water and extreme tides. We offer simple indoor lodging for those interested in joining, and for committed harvesters who can join for the duration, we guide you in obtaining the appropriate licensing and pay for your harvest.
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SCHEDULE
March 27: Arrival for PRE event set-up
March 28: Lola Milholland (Collision of Land and Sea: Japanese Culinary Noodling)
In a hands-on, immersive workshop, writer and noodler Lola Milholland—owner of Umi Organic in Portland, Oregon—shares her love and knowledge of Japanese noodle soup. Join us to:
* Make springy hand-cut udon noodles from scratch
* Forage for seaweed during low tide, learn to harvest and dry, take home a small personal supply
* Build our own Maine-grown and -harvested dashi base
* Share a beautiful meal with farmers, seaweed harvesters, workshop attendees and locals passionate about the ocean
* Harvest spring’s early vegetables
* Prepare and enjoy a hot pot meal together with the noodles and dashi we’ve made using native, wild, and early season produce from beautiful Washington County.
March 28: Megan McOsker (Intertidal Ecology: Evolutionary History of Seaweed as the Foundation of the Marine Food Web)
Megan McOsker grew up in Rhode Island, where she spent as much time as possible in and around the ocean in the company of the coastal inhabitants such as horseshoe crabs, tautog, Irish moss,, beach grass and sea ducks. The coast of Maine is her home and is where she attended College of the Atlantic. There she studied human ecology with a focus on marine ecology, and it was there she became deeply interested in field biology. She has studied Magellanic penguin behavior in Argentina, distribution of humpback, finback, right and other whales in the North Atlantic and even did a project on acid fog. Post college she worked on ocean going vessels studying marine mammals, sea birds and eventually she started working on small passenger ships in the Antarctic, Arctic, Amazon and other locales. Starting a family brought on a more terrestrial existence and she now has had a 15 plus year career as a teacher, kicked off by attaining her masters of science in teaching at the University of Maine. She has taught natural history and ecology at Maine Coast Semester at Chewonki, computer science at Mt. Desert Island High School and physical and life science at Conners Emerson school. During the summer months she has continued to engage in whale research, most recently working for the New England Aquarium right whale project. She has also worked at HS2, a summer program at Colorado Rocky Mountain School for talented, lower income students.. Except for Colorado, where the seaweed is only present in fossil form, she has lived a life surrounded by seaweed. Her favorite memory of kelp is watching a male orca rise up out of the giant kelp forests surrounding Sea Lion Island in the Falkland Islands.
March 31-April 3: Harvesting, drying, learning!
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Registration required: Low Low Tides 2025 — Registration Form
