How To Raise Oysters For Fun and Profit

Are you old enough to remember the ads in the back of magazines like Popular Mechanics in the 50s and early 60s? Things like “Learn Photography”, purportedly promising to teach you how to be a photography professional, but the models pictured in the ads were always scantily clad and looked cold. Or a “Learn Anatomy” textbook, with the ad copy assuring you it would arrive at your door in 6 to 8 weeks in a plain brown wrapper.

One advertisement that always caught my eye was “Raise Chinchillas for Fun and Profit”. The ads promised to set you up in lucrative and easy chinchilla farming. Chinchillas were South American crepuscular rodents that the ads claimed could be sold for their valuable fur. They would sell you the “how to” book, food and chinchillas. Since they purportedly bred rapidly, you would be herding loads of valuable mobile fur coats in a jiffy.

I met a guy who was the only person I ever knew who admitted to trying this. He said, shaking his head and looking into the distance thoughtfully, “You would not believe how many bad things can happen to a chinchilla.”

None the less, I raise oysters for fun, and hopefully someday, for profit. I do this on the Western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, at my cottage in Mathews County, Virginia, in the pristine waters of Winter Harbor. And it is one of the more enormously successful things I have tried in my life.

In 1996 I read about oyster gardening. An organization called TOGA (Tidewater Oyster Gardeners Association), along with VIMS(Virginia Institute of Marine Science) out of Gloucester Point, and CBF(Chesapeake Bay Foundation) were encouraging and educating people to raise oysters from their docks. They hoped to help use the oysters to filter and clean the bay waters, and return the oyster to its historic population numbers.

At one time oysters were so plentiful that it is estimated that they filtered the Bay every three days. Capt John Smith wrote that oysters “lay as thick as stones.” The Chesapeake Bay’s name itself is said to mean “Great Shellfish Bay” in Native American.

TOGA provided plans to house oysters in floats and sources for getting baby oysters. I thought that name “Oyster Gardening” was a little fey, that it should be “Oyster Ranching” instead, but I decided to give it a try. I ordered 1000 oysters from Ken Kurkowski at Middle Peninsula Aquaculture in Mathews. I loaded the back of my pickup truck with 10 sheetrock buckets and headed over to his oyster hatchery. I wrote him a twenty-five dollar check and we walked over to a large outdoor pool. Ken reached into the pool and handed me a small mesh bag about the size of a tangerine. “That’s a thousand oysters?” I asked. “Well, I didn’t count them one by one.” he said defensively, not understanding my question. “You estimate the animals by weight.” I don’t think he noticed all my sheet rock buckets.

Back at the cottage I opened the bag. It all felt a little like a drug deal, what with the price and the small size of the bag. The baby oysters, about one to two months old, were opalescent and about the size and shape of a newborn’s fingernail.

I placed my babies in 2 foot by 4 foot polyethylene bags with a mesh size of 1/8”. This allows food in and waste and predators out. As the oysters or “animals” as they are known to watermen “grow out” they will have to be placed in more bags of a larger mesh.

Initially I kept the bags in a “Taylor” float, made of 4” pvc pipe joined to form a 3 x 4 foot rectangle for flotation, with a wire mesh basket suspended under it to hold the growing oysters. This was secured by a rope to a piling just off my dock, and allowed to swing freely with the tide and wind. The oysters grew fast. Within a few weeks they were the size of dimes. Then disaster struck. Less than a month after getting the oyster seed, Winter Harbor was brushed by hurricane Bertha. The oysters had stampeded, breaking free from the piling and disappearing. Undaunted, I took delivery of another 1000. Looking through the woods a few weeks later I found the original 1000 under some moist seaweed, most had survived. Now I had 2000 oysters.

I had previously talked to one of Winter Harbor’s old timers. I had noticed that there were a large number of vacant oyster leases throughout the harbor. He told me that it used to be a very productive area. “Now not many,” he said, “I just can’t imagine Winter Harbor without oysters.” In fact, if you take a kayak next to the shore, you will find quite a few oysters in the intertidal zone. Col. Gloria S. Diggs (Ret.) Army, my octogenarian neighbor, can be seen every New Year’s Day, in her wellies, loading oysters into a bucket as she walks along the shore at low tide. But these are nothing compared to historical numbers, and historical sizes. I have found old foot long oyster shells in a midden.

My oysters were growing, fast. I split two bags originally containing 2000 babies into four ¼ inch mesh bags. Those bags got split into eight 3/8” mesh bags. Have you ever heard of a geometric progression? Pretty soon my oysters were chasing me off my dock. If oysters are having so much trouble in Winter Harbor and the bay, why are mine doing so well?

The basic theory of oyster aquaculture and oyster gardening has three parts: Grow them fast, grow them clean, and grow them protected. You want to grow them fast, because they become a sellable and edible size in 18 months of ideal conditions, but they become most susceptible to the two principal diseases, MSX and Dermo, at about 2 years old. Grow them clean, off the bottom, because oysters can’t move, and can be smothered by silt and natural fouling in the cloudier nutrient loaded water of the modern bay. Protect them in cages and bags, to keep birds, blue crabs, otters and cownose rays from eating them.

I was starting to feel like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I ran the numbers. At full size, each bag can hold 150 oysters, so I was going to need space for 14 half inch mesh bags. Also, the Taylor floats proved cumbersome. They were heavy and awkward for one person to maneuver, and could only hold several bags.

Pete Perina, of Eastfield Farm came up with the solution I chose. He floats the bags by cable tying recycled 2 liter plastic soda bottles to the four corners of the polyethylene mesh bags, eliminating the need for the heavy Taylor float. Maintenance was then fairly simple. Every week or so you could easily flip the bag over, exposing the sunken side of the bag to the sun and air, clearing it of fouling organisms, allowing the oysters a free flow of water and food.

I now had room for all kinds of oysters. I became obsessed. I put in another 1000 that spring, and another 1000 that next fall. Last fall I put in 25000! At first I was reluctant to eat my babies, but the sheer numbers I was growing forced me to try to eat my way out of my personal oyster population explosion.


Speaking of eating, after years of experimentation, I have determined that oysters are best consumed after being roasted on a grill. However, for those city folks who are not allowed a grill, I have also discovered that they can be cooked in the microwave oven. This is especially handy if you have just a few. First, examine your oyster. It has two shells, which should be tightly closed. If not, discard the oyster. One shell, or valve, is flat. The other curved valve is called the cup. Place half a dozen of them on a microwave safe plate, cup side down, supporting the cup on the outside rim of the plate to preserve those precious bodily fluids. Cook on high for about a minute, or until they just open and steam. Also, oyster shooters have become popular. Place a shucked oyster in a shooter glass, add some hot sauce/and or very spicy Bloody Mary mix, and a shot of ice cold vodka.

What about eating raw oysters only during months containing the letter “R”? It was thought that eating oysters only during cold months was just a holdover from the days before refrigeration. Also, oysters produce eggs and sperm during the months with no “R”, which some felt made them taste more bland and watery.

These days the FDA plans to prohibit the sale of raw oysters obtained from the Gulf coast during the warm non “R” months. As filter feeders, oysters tend to concentrate microorganisms and pollutants. Raw oysters have been implicated in a wide variety of diseases, including Vibrio vulnificus, the most dangerous. While more typically producing nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, it can result in bloodstream infections (sepsis) and severe wound infections resulting in loss of skin, kidney failure, amputations, excruciating pain, and death, especially among the immunocompromised. And Vibrio vulnificus is a particular problem in the warmer water in the Gulf Coast and Florida.
I spent last summer sexing oysters by dissecting them and looking at them under the microscope. I saw way too many creepy crawlies swimming around in them to ever truly enjoy eating a raw oyster again, at least while sober.
I asked neighbor Gloria Diggs whether she worries about eating her oysters raw. “Lawd son,” she said, “back in the 30’s my father used to pack our oysters in horse manure during the holidays to fatten them up. I’ve never been sick from an oyster!”

Oysters are prolific and versatile. In mid to late summer the mature female releases 3.5 million eggs, the male releases many times that of that number of sperm. Oysters start off male, and then as they get bigger they tend to become female, but can revert back to males as needed. Do these acrobatics have anything to do with oysters legendary effects on libido?

Much is made of oysters as aphrodisiacs, more so in popular than in medical literature. Some attribute the oyster’s alleged effect to the fact that they contain Vitamin B12, or zinc, or rare amino acids D-aspartic acid and NMDA (thought to help in the production of the sex hormones testosterone and progesterone.) Casanova allegedly fortified himself for the rigors of the coming day by consuming 50 oysters each morning. History’s first physician, Hippocrates, recommended oysters merely as a laxative. Later, his disciple Galen mistook pneumatics for hydraulics as the cause of tumescence, and recommended oyster consumption for erectile dysfunction in order to increase “wind”.

Most feel the alleged aphrodisiacal properties actually came about because of the freshly shucked oyster’s remarkable resemblance, as viewed in profile, to a women’s….well, look for yourself. I personally have never noticed any particular effect, other than those perhaps caused by accompanying beverages.

You may not have the opportunity to have as much fun with oysters as I do on the shores of the Great Shellfish Bay. But you can certainly help all oyster gardeners, and you don’t have to answer an ad in a magazine to do it. Help discourage agricultural nutrient, silt and storm water runoff, keep your septic system and municipal sewage systems up to date, monitor forestry and resource extraction discharge, discourage wetland development, fund estuarine research…. And eat oysters, just for fun.

Wick Hunt