Our second featured speaker was Tim Chambers from the Greenbelt Native Plant Center of the City of NY Parks & Recreation Department www.greenbeltnativeplantcenter.org.

Their Seed Collection program includes wild-collected seeds from a fifty-mile radius of NYC. Seeds are stored in a Regional Active Seed Bank in conjunction with Kew Gardens (London, England). It is literally a walk in cooler and dryer. Their goal is to propagate native plants for the city. They have six greenhouses for plant production to grow plants for the city and for restoration.

They give guided educational tours of their facilities for schools and after school programs. In addition they have internships and projects involved with seed collection and banking, native plant propagation, nursery management and Founder Seed production with special projects on pollinator biology and conservation, plant population conservation etc.

Our third speaker was John Courtney of Aquascapes www.aquascapesunlimited.com.

His topic was the “Care and Feeding of NJ Native Carnivorous Plants”.

John discussed preservation of wetlands and gave instructions on how to start a container bog;
• Start with container (1-100 gal.) with a hole on the bottom
• Cut a piece of rubber to make for a water reservoir reaching about 2/3 up the side of the container.
• Add soil mix of (50/50 peat and pearlite) + sphagnum (handful )and charcoal
• Mix all together and put in container to the top (mound over the top to give tussock effect) and then you plant it.
• Have in full sun situation.
• Water with distilled or rainwater (must be low salt/mineral)

This annual meeting was the best yet in several ways. First we had the largest in attendance ever about 115 people. Second we had the largest number of native plants available for this time of year, and third we actually made a profit despite paying for the facilities and refreshments. In addition this is the first year we offered 2 continuing education credits to for APLD &CNLP This was also the first year that we had 3 speakers.

Special thanks to the donors below for contributing plants for our Native Plant Sale at our Annual Meeting.
- Pinelands Nursery- Native Plants and Erosion Control: visit them at www.pinelandsnursery.com
- Lowe's
- Dawson Corporation -Stream Bioengineering, Fresh, Tidal, and Salt Marsh Restoration, Lake Restoration and construction: visit them at http://thedawsoncorporation.net
- Paul W. Steinbeiser, Inc Landscape Design & Construction: visit them at www.pwsteinbeiser.com/