Mussels produce spat in the summer months when the water is warmer, and tend to be a little milky during this period. As with the native oyster, mussels can only be marketed in the months with an R in, and even then September can be a little early some times, depending on the weather. The mussel men are a hardy bunch as most of the hard work is done in the winter when the weather is generally cold and windy. Following that, several shellfishermen began to cultivate oysters here, although there are only a couple of producers active today. Also, the waters were shown to be among the purist on the UK coast. The results were very positive and showed an excellent growth rate for oysters. Oysters were first cultivated and farmed in Brancaster about 45 years ago when the AFFA experimented with producing pacific oysters in the waters of BrancasterStaithe. The oysters open their shells to capture as much plankton as possible.ДЄlthough the water here is among the purist in the UK, the oysters are placed in the ultraviolet purification tanks before going to the market. There are several ways different growers proceed, but here in Brancaster, the oysters are cultivated in the marsh creek, where they benefit from the tidal flow both when the tide flows out and when it flows in again. Another positive from a growers point of view is the pacific oyster doesn't spawn in the colder waters of the UK, and therefore can be marketed throughout the whole year,

Eventually placed in a large mesh bag and regularly thinned out to give plenty of growing room and cleaned of any accumulated silt.

A general marketing size would be about 8-10 centimeters. Oysters, mussels, and most other shellfish feed on plankton, so the better the flow of water the more they can feed and the quicker they grow. Therefore a lot of time and effort is spent caring for the young oysters. As the spat grows it is constantly transferred manually by the grower to larger bags with a bigger size mesh. At this stage, the spat is placed in a very fine mesh container or bag. On receipt of the spat, they only measure about 4-5mm in size. The spat is produced by specialist seed growers who then sell them on to the Oyster cultivators. Pacific Oysters are by far the most cultivated as they grow much faster than any other species.

Selling oyster spat