By Lauren Wanko
NJ Today
Much of the beach grass planted in the dunes up and down the East Coast, from New England to the Outer Banks since the 1970s, originated in New Jersey.
“Our initial mandate in our legislation basically said that we would test and develop plant species for dune stabilization and shoreline — tidal shoreline — for the back bay areas and make those materials available to commercial growers who would then propagate that material and make it available for projects,” said Chris Miller, manager of the Cape May Plant Materials Center.
WATCH VIDEO:
The Cape May Plant Materials Center, a part of the USDA, was established after the devastating 1962 storm. The center provides a variety of plants to nurseries in nine coastal states.
“The vegetation helps hold the sand in place, not only the root structure of the vegetation, but also the top growth or the vegetative matter of the plants help catch more sand so you actually build a higher dune, build a wider dune, if you have good vegetative cover,” Miller said.
The harvest season is underway as the team upcuts its crop of American beach grass, commonly known as dune grass.
“It so happens that this year, we had a very good crop of beach grass. We produced about 250,000 stems of beach grass this year,” Miller said. “We’ve gotten orders of about 200,000 now.”
Miller says demand has been high since Sandy wiped out dune systems along the shoreline.
“We want to meet the demands of the commercial nursery industry as far as supplying plants to the projects. We realize there is going to be a lot of dunes that are going to be re-stabilized or re-vegetated,” Miller said.
That means expanding their beach grass crop in the upcoming growing season, continuing to spread the word on the importance of plant diversity on the dunes and heading back into the field to conduct experiments on seeding plant species.
“Certainly American beach grass is going to be probably the initial thing that goes in on a lot of these projects and that’s the initial stabilizer plant, but it’s not the only plant that should be on there,” Miller said.
The Cape May Plant Materials Center tests much of the plant life on Avalon’s two and a half miles of man made sand dunes, dunes that were put to the test when Sandy hit.
“We still experienced 11 to 11.4 foot tides,” said Avalon Mayor Martin Pagliughi. “If you look at the dune system even under those conditions we lost about a third of the frontal dune, which is what it was designed to do. If they weren’t there, we would have had a lot of private property damage on the beachfront.”
Sandy proved Mother Nature’s wrath is a force like no other, but her natural resources may be one of the best defenses.