Join us for a week of immersive seaweed harvest. 

Harvesting, drying, recipes, ecology, and natural history adventures in the low low tides. Downeast Maine is famous for our 22-foot tides, and the cold Labrador current creates extraordinary algal abundance. 

Join Smithereen Farm Seaweed Captain, Kacie Loparto, and other curious people for a week of learning, harvesting, processing, and eating together!

We will cover the ecology and biology of the seaweed ecosystem, hand-harvest techniques, regulations, drying, processing and cultivation of the wild algae species that abound in our area. 

We will help you obtain the proper license for harvesting. Lodging provided, paid work available for committed harvesters.

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!

Registration required: Low Low Tides 2025 — Registration Form