Quilting has taken a bit of a back seat to the rest of my life this summer. Anthony is working on a research project in Boston, and I’ve been running up there every weekend. This past weekend, Anthony had to make a last minute trip to Acadia National Park to look for some Digitadas Laminaria (kelp) for his research project.
Anthony contacted a farmer who harvests kelp to ask him for some nearby sources of this specific species, and he suggested the tip of the Schoodic Penninsula.
Last year Anthony traveled to Ireland where they have a lot of this kelp, but this year they are trying to do a smaller scale test.
The kelp thrives in deep water, so we headed to the shore at low tide.
The team might come back here with their instrument to test the prevalence of a compound the kelp gives off, so Anthony asked me to take a lot of pictures of the landscape with his body in it for scale.
He’s not in that one, but I think that is some evidence for why I am so sore today from running around those rocks.
There was so, so much seaweed and it was incredibly beautiful. I can’t believe I never noticed this stuff before.
It actually took us a while to find THE kelp:
We brought some kelp home on ice so Anthony could use it in the lab. He also found this guy among the seaweed:
