Buffer Your Backyard

Excerpted from the newsletter of Stewardship Virginia, a statewide initiative to help citizens enhance and conserve Virginia’s natural and cultural resources.

If you own property along a stream, wetland or shoreline, consider buffering it. Buffers are plants other than grass along the water’s edge. They filter and slow water draining into a waterway. Excess water running off lawns, roadways and sidewalks during storms can pick up unprotected soil, toxic substances, heavy metals and nutrients that may have been applied to land. These pollutants harm the health of local waterways and larger watersheds.

• Learn how to create a buffer by downloading the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay’s “Backyard Buffers.”

• Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act and Regulations require a minimum 100-foot wide riparian buffer in Tidewater Virginia localities. Download the VA Department of Conservation and Recreation’s “Got Buffer” brochure.

• Want to know more about riparian forest buffers, tree planting for conservation and how you can help the VA Department of Forestry plant more trees in the state? For information on your county’s activities visit the DOF website.

• Use native plants for conservation, restoration and landscaping. For a free list of native plants by region, habitat, type and recommended use, call the Va Department of Conservation and Recreation at 802-786-7951 or visit their website native plant section.