eelgrass + blackberries = one perfect day

Here's how it went:

1. Wake up. Make cappuccino. Eat yogurt and homemade granola. (Dream of sending boys out to fetch fresh berries.)
2. Dig errant roses and sumac suckers and rake dried flower stalks from beloved patch of wild blackberries. (I suppose all of this human tending might make them a little less "wild." On the other hand, they were here long before we were, so I'm sticking with it.)
3. Drive five minutes to our town's best tidal beach. Take black garbage bags and children to water's edge. Children frolic. Michael and I use our hands to loosen piles of well-weathered eelgrass from along the top edge of the beach, where soft sand and beach roses meet.
4. Stuff eelgrass into bags. (This is so easy.)
5. Strip children of freezing, wet clothes. Ask youngest to stop burying perfect stranger with sand. Wrap boys in blankets in the car.
6. Load sandy, grassy bags into the back of our friend's truck. (Thank you, Lex.)
7. With warm spring sunshine on our shoulders, spread fluffy eelgrass on thinned, pruned blackberry patch. Envision its minerals slowly strengthening the soil. Watch boys discover nodules, and smile as they tell me that sitting in the soft, dry mulch is like a trip to the beach—salty and fresh and deeply alive—all over again.

Here's what I learned:

Even though eelgrass grows in the sea, it's not seaweed at all. Instead, it's a flowering plant that forms meadows in the sands and muddy beds of shallow, sheltered waters. It grows in patches ever since the 1930s, when a wasting disease wiped out populations everywhere. Waves and weather help ours pile up on beaches to dry into papery ribbons. We and other coastal gardeners are lucky to have it.

A University of British Columbia's Botanical Garden forum reminded me: Live seaweed is critical to a host of marine life. (Ours marked the top end of a storm surge, when the water was higher than it will be for some time, so I sleep at night knowing it wasn't ocean-bound.) Even so, collecting grass from the length of the beach—while leaving some behind—will shelter and protect any animals left behind.

In my nascent study of permaculture, I also understand that using local materials to heal land (that can then grow food to feed healthy families and communities) is the definition of sustainable. Lex spreads his eelgrass thinly around his broccoli seedlings, which grow up into tender blooms his kids can't refuse. And just one fine day of foraging has enriched our best crop, already.

I can only imagine what it will do for our blackberries.