Low Low Tides: May

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.

Registration required: Low Low Tides 2025 — Registration Form

SCHEDULE

May 26: Arrival

May 27, 2pm 
Feini Yin, Communications Director at North American Marine Alliance
A conversation about fisher-advocacy, values-based seafood, and defending the ocean commons. For those who are new to the ‘ocean space’ it’s not always clear that there are many civil society organizations working to represent the stakeholders of the ocean. Conservation organizations have played a role with environmental lawsuits to block salmon farms, protest toxic waste dumping, and address overfishing, but there are other kinds of organizing that are worth knowing about. Feini Yin will give us a talk about the ecosystem of such advocacy across the US, many of whom are partners with the North American Marine Alliance. NAMA’s theory of change, approach to movement building, and outcomes of past campaigns can help us orient in our work with Seaweed Commons.

May 29: Ben Goldberg
FERTILITY CYCLES: Compost Toilet Workshops
Our life on the land here in outermost Maine coast is profoundly informed by fertility cycles. The products we are harvesting are those who have adapted to a relatively low fertility environment (wild berries, herbs, fruiting shrubs) and those which can metabolize their fertility from the cold nutrient rich waters (algae). Our gardens are powered by rockweed, woodchips and cow manure. As an educational and model agroforestry farm we are interested to learn more about intensional energy cycling and fertility cycling options that fit within our diverse farm operation. This is why we have brought some expertise from the Alchemist-era of back-to-the-land engineers, in the form of Ben Goldberg.
Ben is a lifelong learner and a student of curiosity. With degrees in Human Ecology and Environmental Education from College of the Atlantic and the Audubon Expedition Institute graduate field study program, he is a fan of experiential and practical skill based models of education. Ben now lives in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, which is also unceded Pocumtuck territory near Great Falls, and home to some of the richest soil in the world. Because he grew up playing in mud puddles, Ben cultivated an interest in water and soil conservation. This led to a career in ecological sanitation, which in turn led to a full menu of work and travel experiences, many of which were to install composting toilets in odd places such as national parks and on remote islands. Ben is also an experienced woodworker and consummate re-user of things, many of which end up in his projects. He especially enjoys building tiny houses and worm composting bins. When he is not doing any of those things, you
can usually find him paddling around somewhere in his canoe.
He will be working steadily building two code-compliant composting toilets and discussing his experience with VERMICULTURE (including a desire to explore the use of seaweed as a medium for worm composting to create a locally sourced fertilizer product); you can join in at will during the afternoons to chat and learn with him in a hands-on format. No separate sign-up is required for seaweed harvest attendees, although members of the public are asked to RSVP so we can plan refreshments.

May 27-30: Harvesting, drying, processing, learning!

Registration required: Low Low Tides 2025 — Registration Form