The Group for the East End received a grant from the Long Island Community Foundation enabling it to collaborate with East End residents on three planting projects designed to facilitate awareness about the local natural environment.
Eighty-eight students and teachers from Greenport schools, along with staff from the Group, planted a pollinator garden next to the school’s newly established vegetable garden. According to a press release issued by the Group for the East End, the Group used funds from it to purchase native plants from Glover Perennials. The organization plans to help with future plantings at the school as the school garden will be an on-going project for the students and teachers.
Greenport Science Technology Engineer Art and Math (STEAM) teacher Brady Wilkins said, “this is a wonderful example of how local organizations such as Group for the East End can work in partnership with local communities and encourage young people to become stewards of their own environment. We must continue working together to help them love the environment before we can ask them to help save it.”
The pollinator garden now has 60 native plants in it to encourage bees, butterflies and other pollinators to visit both gardens. The vegetable garden has become an integral part of the school curriculum from elementary classrooms to high school technology classes. (See prior stories here and here.)
The grant also enabled the Group for the East End to plant more than 5,000 beach grass plugs at Sagg Main Beach with the help of South Fork students from Bridgehampton, Southampton and the Ross schools along with members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation and the Surfrider Foundation.
In the third planting project, twenty-one students from the Remsenburg School, led by members of the Group, helped remove invasive mugwort and stinging nettle plants and replace them with a vegetable garden and a native plant border.
Source: Press release issued by the Group for the East End dated June 19, 2017.
