The whole year, including the months there is nothing out there.
Sugar kelp grows in cold water and short days. That is the crop’s one great trick and it is also its constraint: for roughly five months of the year our four acres are open water with a few buoys on it, and no amount of website will change that.
June – July
Lines up, gear ashore
Nothing. The longlines are hauled, scrubbed and stacked on the wharf.
- Blade length
- —
August – October
Seeding twine in the hatchery
Now
Still nothing in the bay. The crop is in a tank ashore, on spools of twine no thicker than a bootlace.
- Blade length
- —
November – December
Outplanting
Seeded twine wound onto the longlines, set about seven feet down. You would not see it from a boat.
- Blade length
- 0.6 ft
January – March
Growing
Blades lengthening in the cold and the dark. This is when almost all of the growth happens.
- Blade length
- 4.5 ft
April – early June
Cutting
Full-length blades, cut before the bryozoan fouls them. Once it does the crop is only fit for feed and fertiliser.
- Blade length
- 9 ft
The figures in that last column are the same ones the opening scene is drawn from. There is no crop on the lines today, so the scene draws them bare.