A great time to eat mussels!

Well the clocks have changed and the nights are drawing in.  Soon it will be daylight here in Shetland for barely six hours each day.  The sun is getting lower in the sky day by day and it certainly is feeling more like winter now.  Sea temperatures are dropping and the growth of the mussels is slowing accordingly.  On top of this the strong winds are evident and the gales are coming in with increasing frequency.  These things can all be challenging for running the farm but we are used to it and keep busy.

This is a great time of year to eat mussels and our customers have been ordering steady volumes of mussels over the past few weeks.   This means harvesting has been busy and we have been getting a lot of our mussels away to market.

We have our largest boat the Pegasus pretty much dedicated to harvesting right now and she is taking out over 30 tonnes a week for sending to wholesale and retail markets through the Scottish Shellfish processing facilities located in Glasgow and Shetland.  It is rewarding to see the shells going to market and for them it’s the end of a three-year growth cycle.  The mussels we are currently harvesting would have settled on to our ropes first back in the spring of 2014 and have enjoyed three summers of Shetland rich plankton to grow from a tiny dot to over 60mm on average today.

As well as getting the mussels harvested, which clears our lines of saleable stock -  we are also filling the lines back up.  We are running two other boats at the moment to take small shells from the sheltered spat (baby mussels) collection sites and reseeding them on to the ropes at the grower sites which have just been cleared.

It’s a constant process, keeping the farming sites full of stock.  Like in land based farming, the farmer must keep their fields productive to make a living – we too need to ensure our lines have healthy stock on them to harness the process of filter feeding of the plankton so we can have new generations of shells coming through over the next few years.

At the moment, we are moving large quantities of these half grown mussels (about 15-25mm long) to the grower sites.  And although they won’t grow too fast now over the winter – we know that once the plankton starts to grow in the summer next year with the longer daylight and warmer water – by this time next year we will have a new crop of 60mm mussels to send to market.

And so the cycle goes on.  It may be winter now but we need to plan ahead and make sure our harvest boat will be busy in the seasons to come.