Agricultural Society to try new farming methods, many farmers in the St. Peters area would come to be familiar with the digging of mussel mud.

MUD IN THE BAY

Of special was the “deep, black, stinking rruid, better known as mussel mud. ” (1 1)

Used in Britain as far back as the 13th century, the value of mussel mud was not realized on PEI until the early 1860s. (12) Previous to the discovery of mussel mud, a variety of fertilizers were used including seaweed. wood ashes, charcoal, and fish offal. The value of mussel mud was in the lime that it contained. In addition to lime, it contained an accumulation of decayed shells of oysters, mussels, quahogs*, other marine mollusks, as well as a small quantity of nitrogen and phosphoric acid. (13) The first application of the shell mud to land not previously mudded was very beneficial. It was found that using mussel mud would improve the fertility of the land for 10 to 12 years. (14) First, however, it had to be reached.

Mussel mud had not been a common fertilizing method due to the difficulty in retrieving it from its underwater deposits. The transporting and digging was difficult work. The equipment used for digging the mud was often made by local businesses. Gertie Yorston recalls that her father, Art Sanderson, built a boom rig for digging mussel mud. (15) The earlier style of machine was small with a one piece heavy sill that extended from a tripod with a heavy base, which supported a swivel crane, that extended out over the open mud hole in the ice to a capstan some twenty five or more feet away. Evolving rapidly, a standard mud digger emerged early in the Industry in 1870 and was used largely for deeper deposits. (16) This latter style would have been the kind used in St. Peters Bay.

Mud digging became an annual winter event, which usually commenced in February until late March, providing the ice was at least 12 to 16 inches thick. According to William Anderson,

They (small oyster beds) were located by sticking a long pole down through the ice, when it was thin, in early winter. A marker was then placed where the beds were. Later in the winter, when the ice was thick enough, the hand-operated mud diggers were pulled out on the ice to the marked spot by individual farmers. The mud was then dug up and hauled by horse and sleigh to the shore where it was piled, or if the sleighing was good, the mud was hauled directly to the fields and spread on the frozen fields. (17)

* A qua/mg is a hard—shelled edible clam of the Atlantic coast of North America.

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