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It started with one neighborhood on one waterway. It became a pilot aimed at spreading good stewardship practices across the inland bays watershed.
By Ken Mammarella
Ken Silverstein simply wanted to engage his community in environmentally friendly activities and inspire residents to care for Love Creek.
His community, Hart’s Landing, fronts the waterway. Love Creek empties into the Rehoboth Bay two miles west of Rehoboth Beach. The community has a pool, as well as a dock for crabbing, kayaking, and birdwatching.
Silverstein did much more than inspire his neighbors. He prompted the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays to design the Bays to Backyards Community Engagement Program.
Bays to Backyards aims to inspire the 100,000 residents to take good care of the Inland Bays watershed. The effort began in 2022 with a meeting of the homeowners association for Hart’s Landing, where Silverstein and his wife had retired in 2010. During the meeting, Silverstein volunteered to form a green team for the community. “We need to be good stewards of the wetlands behind us,” he told the group.
After a year of building the team, he came up with the idea of getting all communities on Love Creek to join the effort. Having no idea how to start, Silverstein reached out to the Center for the Inland Bays. The program was born.
“The program aims to support healthy people, water and wildlife across the Delaware’s inland bays’ watershed,” says Lisa Swanger, the center’s director of outreach and education. “Our focus area is the inland bays’ backyard, including residential communities from the coast to the countryside. They’re going to have access to resources and high-level guidance from our collective partners.
“The goal is to have fun and build community. We’re working together to foster a resilient future for all, and that starts right in our own neighborhoods.”
Getting with the Program
The 32 square miles of shallow inland bays are an environmentally critical component of coastal Sussex County. They are Rehoboth Bay in the north, Indian River Bay below it and, to the south, Little Assawoman Bay west of Fenwick Island. The Maryland Coastal Bays Program covers Big Assawoman Bay and four more coastal bays.
The inland bays watershed in Delaware spans 292 square miles from Lewes in the north, Georgetown to the west and the state line to the south. The area encompasses eight sub-basins with dozens of tributary creeks and 7,300 acres of salt marsh. It includes 11 Sussex municipalities and about 200,000 acres of unincorporated area. Though teeming with residential subdivisions, much of the area remains agricultural.
Over the decades, water quality in the watershed has been significantly diminished. Many sources of pollution and old, failing septic systems have been largely mitigated, but agricultural runoff such as chicken waste and fertilizer continues to degrade the water, leading to occasional large-scale algae blooms that rob the water of dissolved oxygen and occasionally cause significant fish kills.
Bays to Backyards helps bay lovers understand how measures at home can protect water quality. Bays to Backyards focuses on:
- Inspiring community action, including education and outreach.
- Encouraging best practices for managing stormwater and coastal flooding, such as creating rain gardens, no-mow zones and vegetated buffers around stormwater retention ponds. “Plants are effective sponges” of pollutants, Swanger says.
- Landscaping with nature in mind, using native plants that are well-adapted to the local environment and support the local food chain.
- Sustaining and creating wildlife habitats, such as enhancing open space with pollinator meadows.
- Reducing and preventing waste. This includes composting workshops and ways to deal with litter.
- Considering climate change and energy usage. Goals include promoting electric vehicle charge stations, bicycle paths and edible gardens. “The sky’s the limit,” Swanger says.
- Developing site-specific management efforts of core habitats.
What the program does not yet offer is financial assistance. “We’re working on that,” Swanger says.
Down on the Farm—and Beyond
The 450-home neighborhood of Independence northeast of Millsboro was the first community to sign on with the Bays to Backyards pilot program. So far, Independence has developed a pollinator garden, designated a common area as a tree farm, received a matching grant of $4,940 from Delaware’s Urban and Community Forestry Program, and enhanced plantings as part of its five-year improvement plan. Such measures stabilize soils and filter polluted stormwater before it runs into the bays and tributaries.
“We’re doing everything we can,” says retired environmental engineer Rich Watson, the association’s point person on the effort. “We’re very excited to be selected for the pilot program and are anxious to move forward.”
Story Hill Farm, a small and diverse operation east of Frankford, sits in the heart of the watershed. Committed to regenerative agriculture, rotational grazing, permaculture, heritage breeds of animals and native plants, it is a partner in Bays to Backyards. Owners Helen and Steven Raleigh are ready to help homeowners and farmers join the movement via classes, tours, outreach and other activities.
“We’re creating local agricultural resiliency,” Helen says. “If we feed ourselves right, treat the land well, take conservation into that practice and combine all that, then it just makes the whole system healthy for all of us.”
Since setting up in 2019, the Raleighs have committed a dozen acres of their farm to a pollinator meadow. “I tried to make a statement with the meadow, filled with pollinators and birds,” she says. The meadow is a you-pick flower garden, but it is foremost a habitat. Pollinators are integral to the ecosystem. Helen is concerned about what would happen if there are too few to sustain the plants.
The Raleighs are developing a pollinator-meadow seed mix customized for the area. “Ordinary people can do extraordinary things,” Helen says.
Meanwhile, Back at Hart’s Landing
To help the creek and its creatures, Silverstein maintains his yard without fertilizers (which can leak excess nutrients) or spraying for insects. Hart’s Landing has contracted with a stormwater management company to control the invasive phragmites along the wetlands and in the stormwater drains.
“There’s a really big opportunity here to help people reconnect with and revitalize our surroundings while improving the health and value of our residential neighborhoods,” Swanger says.
Bays to Backyards is planned to launch officially in fall 2025. Partners include the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, the University of Delaware Cooperative Extension, Delaware Sea Grant, Tributaries and Story Hill Farm. Updates will be posted on inlandbays.org. For questions, contact lswanger@inglandbays.org.
About the Author: Ken Mammarella is a Delaware native and longtime journalist who in his spare time likes to explore the terrain by bike.
Learn more
State of the Delaware Inland Bays 2021
If you want to help
If you are a beach area property owner, follow the direction in Protecting Inland Bays: A Waterfront Property Owner’s Guide
Subscribe here to Delaware Nature Society’s advocacy newsletter to stay informed of emerging policy changes and action alerts.
https://inlandbays.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/inland-bays-guidebook.pdf
https://inlandbays.org/about-the-bays/2021-state-of-the-bays-report/