Harvesting seaweed at low tide

Since we live on the beach, we’ve long eyed up the swaying fronds of bladderwrack, kelp and dulse seaweed — both as free wild food, and as a cheap home spa treatment.

Today we and our cats braved the miserable weather to harvest some seaweed because it’s the spring low tide, meaning that the tide is out further than at almost any other time of the year — perfect for gathering fresh seaweed.

It’s an experiment, since my main exposure to edible seaweed is confined to nori wraps on sushi, but we’ve gotten a hold of two great books: Seaweed: A User’s Guide and Seaweed: Nature’s Secret to Balancing Your Metabolism, Fighting Disease, and Revitalizing Body and Soul that gave us enough information to take the plunge and gather it for ourselves.

How to gather and harvest seaweed

Here’s quick little movie of Malcolm gathering kelp and red seaweed:

[kaltura-widget wid="8fzprr9ajs" width="410" height="364" addpermission="2" editpermission="2" /]

Benefits of seaweed

According to Seaweed: Nature’s Secret, seaweed contains “thirteen vitamins, twenty amino acids, and sixty trace elements, including iodine and sodium”. The health benefits are too long to list, so I’ll pick my favourite ones:

• regulates blood sugar and cholesterol levels
• prevents and kills cancer cells
• protects and improves function of liver and kidneys
• promotes resistance to allergies
• prevents migraines
• combats anxiety and chronic fatigue

I’m hoping it will help me with candida, and provide us with a free, healthy nutritional supplement. I’m all about free food for lazy people — if it takes too much effort, I’ll pass. But even I can manage to wander down a few hundred feet, cut off a few strands and sling them up above the Aga to slowly dry out.

Drying out the seaweed over the Aga

Drying out seaweed on the stove

Seaweed deteriorates quickly, so we dry ours out over our Aga stove. Other suggestions were to put it in your oven at 150 degrees F or let it dry in the sun, if you’ve got that kind of climate.

Just having a cup of tea with a 1/2 teaspoon of kelp, and well, it tastes like seaweed. Will have to try some more recipes…