Starting Kubecka Native Garden
About the Authors:
Alexandra, Carolyn, and Hope are lifelong gardeners from Huntington, East Northport, and Commack, respectively. They met while enrolled in the Suffolk County Cornell Cooperative Master Gardener Program which they completed in June 2022. As part of their Action Project for their Cornell coursework, they created a Native Pollinator Garden at Kubecka Community Garden in Huntington with generous donations of native plants from ReWild Long Island, LINPI, NNGI, Nissequogue State Park Greenhouse and individual community members.
In addition to expanding and sustaining this garden, they each maintain a vegetable garden at the Kubecka Community Garden and donate the produce grown from seed to local food pantries. They also volunteer, teaching Suffolk County CCE sponsored classes on various gardening topics at local libraries and are active members of the Suffolk County Alliance for Pollinators (SAP).
In 2022 we met as students enrolled in the Cornell Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Program. We partnered together to create a native garden on a public site to serve as a demonstration garden to encourage others to use native plants. It was our Action Project for the Cornell Master Gardener coursework.
After working with the Town of Huntington to select a site at the Robert M. Kubecka Memorial Organic Community Garden, we cleared the site of grass and weeds, and installed pavers and mulch to create paths to encourage visitors to wander and explore. To help get us started, ReWild Long Island invited us to help thin out the ReWild Dodge Garden in Port Washington and take some plants. In addition, ReWild donated a wide variety of native plants to get us started. In addition to ReWild Long Island, Long Island Native Plant Initiative (LINPI) and individuals from the community garden donated many other native plants.
1 Year Old Garden in 2023
Just one year later, the garden is thriving, and we continue to receive donations, most recently from Nissequogue State Park Green House and Northport Native Garden Initiative. This year we added signage to help identify the variety of plants, and with the help of Alexandra’s family, we installed beautiful homemade signs to welcome visitors. We continue to expand the garden and look to add different varieties. We are also working to eliminate the nearby infestation of the invasive Japanese Knotweed.
The garden now includes over 40 different kinds of native plants that bloom from spring through fall and attracts a variety of bees, butterflies, moths, and birds. These pollinators benefit the vegetable gardeners on the 17-acre site of the Kubecka Community Garden.
The garden was recently included in the Suffolk Alliance for Pollinator Native Garden Crawl and is featured on the Pollinator Pathway Huntington site. Visit https://ccesuffolk.org/gardening/suffolk-alliance-for-pollinators-sap and https://www.pollinator-pathway.org/towns/huntington for more information.
If you are in the neighborhood (Dunlop Road in Huntington), come visit!