Peconic Estuary Offers Financial Incentive To Homeowners To Create 'Friendly Yard'

For Sag Harbor resident Mare Dianora, gardening has always been an important part of her family dynamic: She and her family spend countless hours tending to their vegetables, walking the woods and studying local plant life.That is why the family was excited when it first learned of the Homeowners Rewards Program being offered through the Peconic Estuary. The program offers a grant of up to $500 for residents who live within the boundaries of the Peconic Watershed to create a “Peconic Friendly Yard” by installing green infrastructure designed to help protect the local bays and waterways, and encourage native plant life to flourish.

“We had a vegetable garden that has just gotten bigger and bigger every year—it is a huge hunk of our land,” she explained. “We would try to replace grass with food, things that we can eat, more and more over the years. We’ve got chickens and replaced some things with berry bushes, adding more and more edible things to our garden. So the idea of native planting was very appealing to us.”

The program first took root last year, according to Sarah Schaefer, acting director of the Peconic Estuary. The main goal, she said, is to protect local waterways. By helping local residents install the green infrastructure—creating a native plant garden or a rain garden, or purchasing a rain barrel to use collected rainfall later for irrigation, for example—the estuary is hopeful that harmful pollutants and road runoff will be kept out of the struggling bays.

“What people do on land is directly tied to the health of our bays,” she said. “So virtually everything that you do on your land flows into our bays and makes it into the surface water. We want to help reduce the amount of pollutants and encourage people to have more surfaces that allow for infiltration and reduce runoff.”

One of the easiest ways to do that, she explained, is with native plants that can provide food for local wildlife, filter water before it hits the bays, and thrive on their own with little intervention because they are native to the area.

To date, 43 yard projects have been funded and finished, with another approximately 15 applications recently submitted for review, according to Ms. Schaefer.

In Sag Harbor, Mare Dianora said installing a native garden was the perfect project to share with her husband, Claes Brondal, and two sons, Finny, 9, and Ollie, 5. The foursome installed the garden last June, including several types of blueberry bushes, native grasses, and blackberries and flowers.

“It was fun for us to uncover leaves and clear out space and then see what we could start growing there,” she said. “It is a gift that will come back every year. We are so grateful—it was an honor to have this opportunity.”

Over in Flanders, Stephanie Miller and her family also participated in the program after hearing about it from neighbors. For their project, which they installed recently, Ms. Miller and her husband, Kyle, opted for a rain garden, citing pooling water at the base of their driveway whenever it rains. That water, she said, creates a mini stream from the property, which is across the street from the bay.

Now, the water is redirected into their garden, which includes pink azaleas, rosebay rhododendrons, low ground cover plants and bushes. The family has also installed a collection bin for their roof gutters, pouring that into the garden for an additional water source.

“It works well for runs, because we don’t have to water the garden and it makes maintenance really easy,” she said. “We were able to get it all in the ground in one weekend, and it looks really cool.”

Both families have been advocating for the project since hearing about it, encouraging their friends to look into it for their own gardening projects. According to Ms. Schaefer, anyone who lives within the boundary of the watershed is eligible to apply, with a map available at peconicestuary.org to see if a property qualifies.

For those who want to learn more about native plantings for the East End, the Peconic Estuary is hosting a native plant workshop from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 5, at the Big Duck in Flanders. The event is free for participants, and more information is available by calling the estuary at 631-727-7850.

“People are very happy with the results,” she said last week. “Most of the people who apply are already environmentally conscious people who want to do what is best for them and the environment, so this is a chance for more people to have a little incentive to make sure their project is what they want it to be.”