Healing Tide

Tanya Stiller, runs the non-profit “Healing Tide” as a collective to support the oceans and particularly the intertidal zones of our Northern California coastline. I asked her to join me on the podcast to share about the wisdom of the seaweeds.

Tanya and I met many years ago at the Northern California Women’s Herbal symposium. At that event, there is a marketplace where women bring different herbal concoctions that they have prepared to barter or sell amongst their peers. Living at an organic and biodynamic winery, I would always bring some Frey wine with me to trade. And Tanya always had some delicious bitters that she would bring. In addition to loving digestive bitters myself, I was always impressed with the variety of flavors that Tanya created. So, for years, we got to know each other trading wine for bitters, until I had quite a collection of tasty digestives! 

In all my years of studying herbalism and homesteading and other rootsy as can be crafts, I never got around to learning about seaweed harvesting. I had the desire absolutely as someone who adores the ocean. But for one reason or another, whether it was my parenting years or it seemed like the best practice was not to harvest seaweed, I didn’t get to know my local sea scene. 

Fast forward to 2022 and the more formal return of gathering and workshops. Tanya posted that she was holding a sea weeding weekend. I was actually in the airport scrolling my feed when I was stopped in my tracks. I got an enormous yes —it was finally time for me to learn about seaweeds, so I signed up on the spot. 

Then, at a negative tide (that’s when the tide is really low) over the summer, we all gathered on the Mendocino coast to camp, learn, and tend the coastal zone. It was a magical time and we’ll discuss more of the happenings of the workshop in the podcast, but suffice to say that I was so thrilled to finally meet the sea weeds where they live that I asked Tanya to share more about them and how we can be better coastal stewards, on this podcast. 

In addition to getting to harvest, eat, and tend the seaweeds on the Mendocino Coast, Tanya and I went on a hike with some of the other seaweed weekend folks one day. We had the incredible pleasure of getting to see whales spouting off the coast while we were harvesting sea salt from little depressions on the coastline.

In other words, we dropped in really deeply! I hope that you’ll enjoy this podcast about one of the most amazing subjects on the planet: seaweeds!!! For more information about Tanya’s workshops, check out her non-profit, Healing Tide.