Successful Winter Sowing for Tiana Bayside

Adding Color & Nectar to Coastal Habitat Restoration at Tiana Bayside

Over the last few years, CCE Marine has been expanding the varieties of coastal habitat plants we are working with. We started a small nursery of native coastal flowers and shrubbery (seaside goldenrod, beach plum, sand cherry, bayberry, eastern red cedar) to start mingling into our coastal restoration plantings.

Being that we are already immersed in coastal habitat restoration, and are working to expand our coastal plant nurseries at our Hampton Bays facility, we figured why not help out some important friends and add some color and nectar to our plantings while doing so! Thanks to Southampton Town CPF and NFWF support, and in order to increase our efforts of coastal habitat restoration and community education, we developed a SEAd Bomb Kit!

Using our winter sowing SEAd mixture from the kits we set up a bunch of our deep nursery grow out trays in a backyard garden and covered them with a sheet of 3 mil plastic sheeting in February. Every week we would water them if needed and by the end of March we had seedlings! Fast forward to now, the beginning of May and we have hundreds of rootbound seedlings ready to transplant into the nursery beds at Tiana Bayside.

The habitat will provide food and shelter for many pollinators. With plenty of milkweed in the mix we hope to provide many host plants for monarch caterpillars for successive generations of monarch butterflies. Tiana Bayside Facility is In the Monarch Eastern Flyway Zone and a sustainable and reliable food and habitat source is crucial for one of the worlds most cherished pollinators. Human induced habitat destruction and climate change have taken a toll on the milkweed family of plants and our coastal habitats. We are doing our part to restore the population of milkweed plants.

Our SEAd Bomb Kits are a great and easy way to get the community involved in habitat restoration not only at our vulnerable shorelines, but at people’s homes, places of work, and local parks. And they provide the added bonus of attracting beautiful and beneficial pollinators, like monarch butterflies.