How Can You Culture Oyster & Mussels?
- 1). Place heavy stones in the shallow tide areas of your chosen beach. These would be the areas that tide pools typically collect in. Wait for about a month and you will see oysters and mussels beginning to form on the sides of the heavy stones. Wait for them to grow into fully developed, marketable sizes before harvesting them off the sides of your heavy stones.
- 2). Place your bamboo stakes in the softer muddier shallow beds. Place your stakes three meters away from each other. Measure both your stakes and the tide and make sure that your stakes are just as high as the highest tide on the level area of the beach. Bamboo allows for a smaller amount of oysters and mussels to be collected than the broadcasting method, but the ones collected typically grow bigger over time due to the lack of crowding. This is known as the "stake" method.
- 3). Place two stakes 30 cm away from each other at a depth of 2.5 meters during the lowest tide. Tie each end of your nylon string to one of the stakes. At the point of one to two weeks you will begin to see spats of mussels and oysters beginning to form along the course of the nylon string. This is known as the "hanging method."
- 4). Place six stakes down in an intertidal area. Tie a rope to the left row of stakes. Tangle the ropes and create a web pattern before tying the other sides of the ropes to the right row of stakes. This will create a rope web. A rope web allows for spats to get caught on and in between the web. The amount of sediment that can build up in between the crevasses in a rope web will allow you to culture a great deal of oysters and mussels. This is known as the "rope web" method. This method of culturing originated in Scotland.
- 5). Place your wooden polls 3 meters away from each other in the intertidal area of your chosen beach. Place them at the lowest tide so they will generally be covered in water until the low tide of the day. This method is very similar to the bamboo stake method, but differs in that the bamboo stakes are smoother and although they don't catch a lot of spats the smoothness makes the caught spats less vulnerable to predatory crabs. Wooden poles will allow you to culture more spats at once, but they will be more vulnerable to beach-dwelling predators.