Oyster Exchange

Jordan Westenhaver and I are Chesapeake Bay Foundation VoiCeS volunteers and have an oyster garden at New Quarter Park. Last night we rounded up the oysters we raised from spat for the last year and returned them to Tommy Leggett and crew at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Virginia Oyster Restoration Center at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). After telling our juvenile oysters to be well and prosper, we picked up a bag with 1000 more spat to raise from this July to next for the Citizen Oyster Gardening Program.

Each summer, CBF's Virginia Oyster Restoration Center provides citizens with the information they need to help restore native oysters to the Chesapeake Bay. Volunteers are provided with spat-on-shell that they raise at their dock or a local facility with water access. The one year olds are taken to one of several sanctuary reefs in the Chesapeake Bay that are being built for the purposes of restoring oyster reef habitat used by a wide range of plants and animals and allowing the oysters to filter pollution from the Bay. When oysters feed by filtering microscopic plants from the water, they improve water quality and clarity. Rebuilding reefs and stocking them with oysters is a high priority for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. There was an article in today's Daily Press about the oyster restoration effort in the York River, where our oysters will be dumped on a new reef home.

VoiCeS stands for Volunteers As Chesapeake Stewards. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation program was started in 2004 to create a group of volunteers with a deeper understanding of the Bay and the efforts to restore it. The professionally-taught, two-part program, meets each week for eight weeks. Participants learn about the Bay's biology and how they and their community can help its restoration. VoiCeS gives members a greater understanding of their own watersheds and service of 40 hours over nine months on a Bay-related projects is required.

New Quarter Park has been a great partner. Our park has been recognized for its commitment to environmental stewardship. The 545-acre York County park is located on the York River near the Queens Lake neighborhood at 1000 Lakeshead Drive.