Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1893 — The Oyster Garden of Arcachon. [ARTICLE]

The Oyster Garden of Arcachon.

The great oyster garden at Arcachon, France, is a basin on the Bay of Biscay, connected with the Atlantic only by a very narrow opening, and is sixty-eight miles in circumference and protected from winds by the pine-clad heights that surround it. The waters are salt enough, and yet not too strong, the bottom is of the gravelly sand favorable to oysterbreeding, and the rise and fall of the tides are such that the basin is completely covered at high tide and the beds are largely uncovered at low water. The oyster has always been an inhabitant of this spot. The stock had“become nearly exhausted forty yeafe ago, but has been recruited by individual enterprise under the encouragement of the government. There are now twelve thousand five hundred acres of oyster beds in the basin. Several thousand men and women are employed to attend them, and the average annual sale of oysters by the principal firm is over two hundred millions. As the majority are not sold under two years old, and these only for relaying, it is computed that there as-e usually five hundred million oysters of various ages upon these beds. The beds having been artificially made, the whole process of oyster-breeding can be witnessed there. They are laid out in parks, each park embracing twenty or more beds, and between the parks, as between the sections of the beds, are waterways for the passage of boats. The beds are made of sand and gravel. upon foundations of wooden piles, and raised above the level of the basin bottom, hut not to such an extent as to expose them at other than low tides. A barrier of “switches”or nets protects the beds from fishes. Sets of earthenware tiles are arranged for the reception of the young oysters or “spat,” coated with mortar, so that anything fixing itself to them may be scraped off easily. Sometimes each of these tiles will.be covered by five or six hundred young oysters. They develop rapidly, and in about a month take the form of real miniature oysters. Then they need more room, and are thinned by scraping, to be placed wider apart on other tiles, or to be transferred to their ■filial bqds, or to wire-bottomed trays.