Salvaging Seaweed on the Oregon Coast
Salvaging Seaweed and Bull Kelp Pickles!
On the Oregon Coast, there is an abundance of wild coastal foods available for harvesting on land and in the sea. Dungeness crab, salmon, oysters, halibut, the list goes one. Many of these are known and favored by both our commercial and recreational fisheries, but one coastal edible that many foragers and fisherman may look right over is seaweed. One of my favorite seaweeds, or kelps, to harvest and pickle is bull kelp! Keep reading to learn how to salvage seaweed and make bull kelp pickles.
Seaweeds span our coast range and cover our intertidal ecosystems. In fact, the Pacific Northwest is home to more kelp species than anywhere else on the planet! Yet it’s safe to say that most people don’t know much about seaweed and/or kelp identification and edibility (kelp refers to the group of large brown seaweeds).
While there is no commercial harvesting of seaweed allowed in Oregon, there is a recreational harvesting season of live seaweed from March to mid June, only 4 months of the year! Live seaweed harvesting refers to cutting seaweeds off of a rock or substrate that they are still physically attached to. But outside of this season, foragers are still allowed to salvage seaweed off of the beaches, or collect any that has already been detached from its substrate. Salvaging is also a great solution for collecting seaweeds that may grow out of reach of low tide beaches.
The main thing to think about when salvaging seaweeds is freshness. Really, a seaweed should appear as though it just washed out of the ocean, is fresh, and in good shape. And if you don’t necessarily know what it looks like when it’s fresh, just remember fresh would mean it’s not deteriorating, getting super stinky, covered in flies, and whatever else food does when it goes bad.
For Bull Kelp Pickles, the species you need to harvest or salvage is obviously, Bull Kelp, a species that I actually only ever salvage off beaches, rather than actually live harvesting. Bull Kelp grows in deeper waters, where low tides don’t always reach, meaning you would need a boat to access a bull kelp bed. And while it sometimes grows in great abundance, in Oregon, we are rapidly losing our bull kelp for reasons I won’t go into in this article! So I stick to salvaging bull kelp rather than removing it from the environment it’s growing in.
Bull Kelp makes up the majority of our kelp forests along the Oregon Coast, and provide habitat for thousands of species. Though hard to believe because of their size, they are actually an annual species, meaning they die off and return every year. Bull kelp (and most other seaweeds) are incredibly efficient photosynthesizers, and under the right conditions these algae can grow up to 10 inches per day! Through their process of photosynthesis, they are also providing us and our waters with necessary oxygen.
Now, of all the varieties of seaweeds, Bull Kelp is pretty easy to identify. If you’ve ever stepped foot on any beach from Northern California to Alaska, you’ve likely seen it, or even played with it. It is made up of one very long (10-60ft) stipe, or stem-like structure, with a big hollow bulb at the top. Most often it will still have long golden green blades coming off of the bulb, or if those have been removed in its travel to the shore it’ll just have little nubs on the bulb where they were once attached. Upon further inspection you may realize that the long stipe and the bulb are hollow, making them incredibly fun to jump on and pop. The stipe, or long stem, is actually the part of the bull kelp that most people pickle.
