Winter is cancelled
This is our fourth winter on Cape Cod, and I didn’t like any of the first three. It’s not just that my cold tolerance is decreasing as I age, the snow turns our driveway into a carnival ride, and my husband insists on winter activities centering around the possibility of falling through ice into water. It’s that winter on Cape Cod is isolating. Restaurants are closed. Tourists are gone. Everyone whose driveway is a carnival ride stays home, huddled around the woodstove.
This winter, though, this winter is different. It’s the first week in February, and the ground isn’t frozen. We’ve had exactly one snowstorm, and the foot of snow melted in 48 hours. Temperatures have been in the forties most days, and occasionally in the fifties. The only body of water that has iced over is the puddle on the low spot in our driveway.
Each day that is warmer than normal seems like a gift, a gift that takes us one day closer to our goal of an ice-free winter.
Even if I weren’t an oyster farmer, the prospect of an ice-free winter would make me happy. But the thirty thousand or so oysters we still have in cages out in Barnstable Harbor give an ice-free winter a whole new meaning.
Most oyster farmers take all their stock and equipment in over the winter because ice destroys everything its path. You can leave nice neat rows of cages out in December and come out to heap of twisted wire in March. We took in our seed (oysters we got as pinheads last spring) just around New Year’s, and the 100,000 one-inch oysters will remain safely stowed in a giant refrigerator until, probably, April. But we still had a good number of this year’s crop that didn’t quite make it to three inches, the size at which we can legally sell them. At this very moment, Kevin and I may own more 2 7/8-inch oysters than anyone on the planet.
We’ve been ready to take them in for a couple months now. We’ve planned to put them in big plastic boxes called fish totes, that hold about 800 oysters each, and store them in our basement, which stays cold but doesn’t freeze. It’s not an ideal way to store them, and we would expect a good portion of them to die, so we didn’t want to take them off the water until we had to.
And so we watched the ten-day weather forecast, waiting for temperatures to drop low enough to freeze the water in the harbor. As long as there was no ice, there was no need to bring in the oysters.
All December, there was no ice and no prospect of ice. And again in January. And now it’s the first week in February, and the ten-day forecast shows more of the same. It’s beginning to look like we’re going to have an ice-free winter, which, with luck, our almost-legal oysters will spend not dying in Barnstable Harbor.
So far, so good. We went to check them yesterday, and found them happy and healthy. Some of them even showed signs of growth, in the form of a translucent white ring around the edge of the shell. Growth! In February!
I’m sure a freakishly warm winter will have unfortunate repercussions. A little later in the year, we may have wall-to-wall insects, an unpredictable growing season, or mutant raccoons the size of mastiffs. At this point, though, I’m ready to pay almost any price. One more month, please. One more month.
The January harvest
We’ve got a goal, here, this year. We’re trying to get 20% of our total caloric needs from first-hand food. So, at the end of each month, I’ll be tallying up the harvest. But, before I give you January’s list, I have a confession. At the end of last year, when I added up our total 2011 take and figured out it was about 11% of our calories, I thought it would make all of you hunters, gatherers, fishermen, and gardeners curious about your own year in food. I thought I’d get comments … [Read More...]
How to deep-fry an egg
First, get a Fry Baby. A Fry Baby is the world’s smallest deep fryer, and we got ours at a Yankee swap hosted by our friends Tommy and Ali, for which all the guests were instructed to bring something that’s been lying around the house for ages but never used. We brought a platter we’d bought at a yard sale a few years back, but somehow never warmed up to. But one couple brought this 1970’s-era miniature deep-fryer. Imagine! They had it for years, and it was still in the box! There’s … [Read More...]
Math-man-ship
Buying boats is like playing leapfrog. You buy a boat, and you have to buy a truck to pull it. You buy a truck and then, one day, it occurs to you that your truck could pull a bigger boat. You want a bigger boat – you always want a bigger boat – so you buy a bigger boat. You do a lot of towing of that bigger boat, and one low tide when you have trouble getting up a ramp you realize that a bigger truck could tow your bigger boat more safely and reliably. You buy a bigger truck. You’re happy … [Read More...]
Who goes there?
The first snowfall always shatters my illusion of privacy. I go out, the morning after, to discover that it’s Grand Varmint Central out there. There are rabbits criss-crossing the driveway. There are raccoons (still!) trying to get in the chicken coop. There is the occasional wild turkey. There is a coyote, or maybe the neighbor’s German shepherd. But what the hell is this? It’s a series of tracks, in one line, evenly spaced a little less than a foot apart. Each print is a … [Read More...]
Roots for the home team
Do you want the good news or the bad news? We’ll start with the good news. The good news is that our hoophouse has successfully extended our growing season. Granted, it’s gotten an assist from the warmest winter in human memory, but it still felt good to be out there in January, harvesting the parsnips and beets I planted in the early summer. Or at least it did, until I got the bad news. Root vegetables allow gardeners to remain in denial up until the very last moment. When you’re … [Read More...]
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