Underwater Grasses Planted in Mill Creek

I said bye-bye to my baby grasses over the weekend.

It was back in March that I sewed their tiny seeds in a gritty sand-soil mixture and submerged them in a big black tub filled with water. Then I watched and waited, and watched some more, until their slender green blades started to emerge about a month later.

As the days grew warmer, the wild celery (Vallisneria americana) began to grow longer. Thanks to evaporation, I had to add water to the tub to keep the SAV – sub-aquatic vegetation – truly sub-aquatic. I also changed the light bulbs that ran 24/7 in the two desk lamps that hung over the growing station.

But now, the time had come: my grasses were growing up, and it was time for them to move out of my basement and go to work.

Their job is to help clean up Mill Creek, the murkiest and most oxygen-starved tributary of the Magothy River. Its poor quality helped drag down the Magothy River’s health score to a dismal 22 percent, for a grade of D-minus on this year’s annual index released by the Magothy River Association (MRA) in February.

I joined more than two dozen other .

Sub-aquatic vegetation like wild celery and eelgrass serve as a valuable food source for waterfowl, provide habitat for fish and shellfish, and add oxygen to the water. They also absorb excess nutrients and trap and hold sediments that make the water cloudy.

On Friday and Saturday [June 24 and 25], volunteers dropped by Alexanna’s home on Mill Church Road to turn in their grasses and return the growing equipment which was on loan from the MRA. Small mountains of filters, lamps, power cords, aquarium heaters and thermometers formed in front of the Page house garage.

The growing team received instructions via email to place wet newspapers over the tender new grasses and put their three growing tubs in plastic bags to transport them to the planting site on an underwater shelf near the headwaters of the creek.

“You want the SAV to stay wet!” Alexanna wrote.

Alexanna and other scouts from Troop 57, a team of local Boy Scouts, friends, adult volunteers, and members of the Magothy River Association spent several hot, muddy hours both days loading the grasses into canoes and onto a floating work dock and wading with them out to the planting site, which was fenced off to keep hungry waterfowl at bay. Nearby, a grid laid out with string marked previous planting spots where shoreline grasses poked up out of the water.

Maureen Turner, a member of the growing team, gave permission for the volunteers to use her dock to access Mill Creek. Several other Divinity Cove neighbors pitched in as well.

MRA President Paul Spadaro said such grass-growing projects not only help the river, where grass beds have dropped from more than 300 acres in 2005 to less than two today, they help more people feel a direct connection to the waterways.

“We’re saving the Magothy for future generations,” he said. “The younger generation has to take the lead.”

A hot and tired Alexanna, a rising junior at , deemed the project a success.

“We had a big turnout with a lot of grasses to plant,” she said. Looking out over the water, which was a shade of café au lait, she added, “It still needs a lot of work, but every little bit helps.”

Like my little patch of grass. It makes a mother proud.