When warmer weather arrives, many of us dare to leave our beloved Santa Clarita Valley and take trips outside its boundaries. In my case, I just returned from a trip to France to visit many members of my family.

My sister, husband and I managed to carve out a short week of real vacation and free time in the very old town of La Rochelle along the Atlantic Ocean. The area is known for its delicious oysters, and the first night after our arrival, we looked for a restaurant serving oysters. They were easy to find and looked delicious.

I’ve always been aware of the rule, “One should eat oysters only in the months of the year that have an R in their name.” I have no idea why, but we were in mid-May. No “R” in the word, “May.” So what is that all about? I asked the waiter. His answer: “Well, very soon the oysters are going to get milky, and customers do not enjoy them like that.” I stood there with mouth agape. Milky? Milk in oysters? Why? Milk is usually to feed babies. I was way over my head, and our Internet connection was spotty at best, so I could not run to Google to find my answers.

The next day we boarded a small boat taking us to the island of d’Oleron, where oyster farming is an important industry. The word “industry” takes on a different meaning in this case. It is done by many different families with a lot of hands-on work, but the production is large.

When we arrived in the harbor, we saw empty metal baskets lying on the dock. Step one: When placed in the water, oysters grow in those baskets, which are turned over by hand so the oysters benefit from the fresh plankton brought in by the tide.

How do they reproduce? I was in doubt, so I asked the captain of the boat. The oysters are hermaphrodites: They can change sex after each season or after they release the sperm.

During the first year of reproduction, the oysters are usually male. When the water gets to the proper temperature, about 10 degrees Celsius in the spring and again in the summer around 22 degrees Celsius, the sperm is released. That is the “milk” the waiter was telling me about. Sometimes the water gets all white from so much sperm.

That afternoon, after exploring the island, we returned to the same harbor and discovered an excited but respectful group of people gathering about. “What is happening?” we asked. “The babies are coming,” was the answer. You learn to ponder and reflect when you get this kind of answer, but as everybody was watching for a boat coming into the harbor, we understood that baby oysters might be the topic.

Indeed, we saw the fishermen carefully unloading rods with many suction cups that are covered with tiny baby oysters. The rods look at bit like plungers. These oysters from the island of Oleron are deep oysters; they are large oysters with plenty of meat, and the fecundation of the babies is done in the water, not inside the shell, as it is for flat oysters. They are oviparous. About 20 to 100 million eggs are produced (I really wonder how they count that?) but only 10 percent survive. Many float around, attaching themselves to a rock where, once they are grown, people are happy to scrape them off and take them home in a basket to enjoy eating them for lunch.

The larvae develop in about six hours. Then it takes them about three weeks to settle on the plungers, but they do not reach maturity for about one year.

This is all interesting, but where are those plungers covered with baby oysters going? When you drive around the estuary, you can see many basins in all of the fields. The basins were salt flats in the past, but they have been recycled to grow the baby oysters in a calm environment.

With a system of locks, the water from the tides can be controlled in those basins (called “claires”). They are used for a specific purpose related to the color of the oysters. The Marennes oysters, as they are known, have a specific, light blue-grey cast that develops in the brackish water in the marshlands because of a micro algae that grows in the shallow ponds, giving the oysters their specific delicious hazelnut taste and unique color.

Going back to my initial question, it is better to eat oysters from October to May because it is a good guarantee they won’t be milky. The sperm production starts when the water gets warmer.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip with me. I learned many new things, and I hope you did, too. The price of one large Marennes Oleron oyster is $1.25 – maybe not enough of a reason for the long trip to France, but the area is very pretty, old and lovely, so if you go that way, do not forget to sample the oysters if you’re there at the right time of year.

Evelyne Vandersande has been a docent at the Placerita Canyon Nature Center since 1986. She lives in Newhall.