The baskets of apples, oranges and bananas are in plain sight for customers entering the Downtown Grocery and Deli on Wood Street. The location is perfect for enticing store customers to buy a healthy piece of fruit instead of an unhealthy snack, said …
Ramapo Tomato Seed an Option With Flavor
This article was written by Mona Bawgus, a certified master gardener and consumer horticulturist with Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Atlantic County.. With a goal to find the tomato that best represented what people remember as the old Jersey tomato,…
Raised Gardens Good For Veggies
This article was written by Mona Bawgus, a certified master gardener and consumer horticulturist with Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Atlantic County… Raised-bed gardening is an old technique that improves vegetable yields, has easier weed control, …
Green Thumbs: Get a Jumpstart on Spring with Forced Blooms Indoors
If this winter has not gotten you down, you are among the few and a touch of spring would definitely be a boost to most gardeners. There are several flowering shrubs and trees that can be pruned and forced to bloom earlier indoors… Place your branche…
Cape Coastal Towns Embracing Native Species of Plants
The Japanese black pine is the Rodney Dangerfield of trees. It gets no respect. Banned from Avalon’s dunes for the last three years, the species is under consideration for elimination from Stone Harbor’s dunes. Recommended until 1990 by the USDA to be planted in shore areas, the tree- labeled invasive and a fire hazard- has since fallen out of favor… Several Cape May County coastal communities have already started to branch out on their own, and a strong trend toward cultivating native species is beginning to take root… “You have to look at the whole system,” said Jenny Carleo, agricultural and resource management agent with Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Cape May County. “You have to look at the animals that depend on the food in the area, the utility of the beach for access, and you have to prioritize use. You have to ask, ‘What are the impacts to the whole environment of doing a certain activity?'”
Spotlight on Rutgers’ Oyster Research at Cape May Canal Draws Industry Out of Shell
What looks like a water-purification business to many people transiting the Cape May Canal by boat is actually a research facility. David Jones, laboratory researcher and the Aquaculture Innovation Center operations manager, said he doesn’t think many people know about the Rutgers University facility or its scope of operations… The food that Rutgers AIC is not-so-secretly developing is oysters… “Rather than traditional fishermen that are harvesting wild oysters from the bay, the oysters grown in the lower (Delaware) Bay use a containerized system,” said Lisa Calvo, Aquaculture Extension program coordinator. “They all go pretty much to a half-shell market, a more specialty niche market of high-end restaurants and better markets for eating raw on the half shell.”
Red Knot Protection Could Take Toll on Oyster Industry, Beach Replenishment
A recent decision by the federal government to list a migratory shorebird as a threatened species could have implications beyond the Delaware Bay beaches where the birds come each spring to feed on horseshoe crab eggs.. While wild oyster harvesting began locally in the 1730s, using the tidal flats to grow them, a French method known as “rack-and-bag” is relatively new… “There are nine growers on the Delaware Bay, though one is not active, and they grow 1.5 million oysters a year,” said Lisa Calvo, aquaculture program coordinator with New Jersey Sea Grant at Rutgers University.
A Brief History of the Delaware Bay
Much of what is going under as the sea advances is material that was deposited as previous ice sheets melted. The Cape May Formation, the major geologic formation along the bay, was deposited during previous interglacial periods as rivers ran to the sea. Much of the Cape May Delta was created by a larger ancestral Great Egg Harbor River. Melting ice created land that now is threatened by higher seas… Underneath Sandy Hook, we found 270 feet of sediments deposited since 20,000 years ago,” said Kenneth Miller, a marine geologist at Rutgers University.
Global Warming Led River, Ocean to Meet, Form Delaware Bay
At the height of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, the Delaware Bay did not exist. Then a warming trend, which continues to this day, joined the ancestral Delaware River with the ocean to create today’s Delaware Estuary. An estuary is a tidally flooded river valley. But 20,000 years ago, there were no tides yet to form it… “The ocean was 60 to 90 miles off the coast. Sea levels were about 390 feet lower back then,” said Kenneth Miller, a marine geologist at Rutgers University.