A Canadian Family

Mmmm – Prince Edward Island Seaweed Deserts!

The other day I blogged about the Jersey, Channel Islands practice of  harvesting seaweed (vraic) off the beaches.This prompted a  little trip down memory-lane for Carol-Ann (Theriault Gen.12).

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“I visited PEI a few years back to attend the wedding of a cousin (Lagace, Gen.11).  While taking a walk on the beach I had the pleasant surprise of coming across a horse galloping through the ocean with a few men standing nearby.

My cousin explained that they were seaweed harvesting.  There is a semi-floating ‘sled’ attached behind the horses which drag them along to collect the seaweed brought in by the tide. They overturn the sled on the beach, collect the seaweed, then load it into a pickup truck for transport.
I imagine the way it is done today is much the same as it was then – the triangles you see are semi-floating sleds  and since they didn’t have pickup trucks they may have dumped the seaweed into small boats to bring to a central depot rather than pile it on the beach and bring it in by pickup truck.”

Note from Evelyn:  In case you haven’t read the former post, I’d asked what the mysterious “triangles” lying on the Jersey beach might be. Carol-Ann believes they might be the same sleds we see being pulled by this white horse – although these appear to be diamond-shaped. In Jersey the seaweed was harvested for fertilizer and heating – and they harvested different types at different times of the year.

At the Prince Edward Island Harvests site, I learned that what they are harvesting is Irish Moss, which contains something called carrageenan, an ingredient in food production. So apparently the term seaweed is used quite loosely on both sides of the pond! See the links below for some unique dessert ideas!

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Related Post:

Vraic

Further Reading:

Prince Edward Island Harvests

Canadian Geographic: Our Home and Native Tongue: Mossy lingo from P.E.I.

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January 31, 2009 - Posted by Evelyn Yvonne Theriault | . | Prince Edward Island, Work