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Students help effort to save beach
Published November 17, 2009
Howdy! What a productive weekend.
I had the opportunity this weekend to visit Brazoswood High School and the School District 7 Student Council annual meeting hosted by Brazoswood High and Alice Artman. Saturday morning, 21 high school student councils invaded Lake Jackson. Schools from as far away as College Station were in attendance.
Teens at the beach: After lunch, they all met at Surfside and were hosted by the Save Our Beach Association of Surfside and Bob Eastman. The group gathered trash bags and picked up trash that floated in with our recent high tides. Some reinstalled many feet of sand fence (up north they call it snow fence).
The Atascosita High School Student Council went with me to Access Road 1 and we planted a little more than 200 potted sand dune grasses, bitter panicum. We included a little experiment with half of the plants.
In our trial, we used a new product that is supposed to retain moisture and make it available for the plants instead of allowing the water passing on through the sand. Hopefully, this product will retain the moisture around the root zone. We’ll let you know how that works in a later column.
Both Bob and I were extremely impressed with the enthusiasm and overall good nature of these high school students. As I told them at the beginning of their meeting, they really warm my heart. They willingly and cheerfully tackled their chore and seemed to enjoy the beach and the whole day.
Plants and Dunes: The plants we are using are common to our county and were washed away with many of our sand dunes as a result of Hurricane Ike. Where there was a stand of healthy dune grass, the erosion was less.
If these plantings continue to grow and establish themselves, we are going to be doing a lot more of them this spring. If you have a group that would like to adopt a certain portion of the beach, we will be dividing the beach up from San Luis Pass to the village limits of Surfside Beach. So if this is something your group might be interested in, please contact our office at 979-864-1558 or 281-756-1558, Ext. 112, or r-tillman(at)tamu.edu, and we will get with you to assign you a section of beach.
Now that these tides have receded some, it would be a great time to get some youngsters together and catch some big redfish that are hanging near the beach. Take a child fishing.
Rich Tillman is the Brazoria County marine agent. Contact him at 979-864-1564 or e-mail richt(at)brazoria-county.com.
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