FHS Monarch Waystation
The Freeport High School Monarch Waystation
Sea Friends’ first restoration project: a permanent native-plant bed built and planted with two Freeport High School clubs, and certified by Monarch Watch. It’s the working model for everything we do next.
A courtyard bed that does real water-quality work.
In the interior courtyard of Freeport High School, Sea Friends designed and installed a permanent 8-foot cedar raised bed and filled it with 58 Long Island ecotype native plants across 14 species. It is a small planting with a specific job: deep-rooted natives take up excess nitrogen from stormwater before it reaches the bay, and milkweed gives migrating monarchs the one plant their larvae can’t live without.
It is also the proof of our model — a community partner brings the ground, students put the plants in and learn why, and the habitat keeps working long after the planting day.
Built and planted on site, by hand.
The build
Sea Friends donated premium kiln-dried western red cedar and hardware. The FHS Woodshop built the raised bed — a stacked-tier cedar wall with galvanized bracing — and set it in the courtyard, lined to drain and to hold back root suckers from an adjacent locust.
The soil
The bed was filled on site with roughly 1.15 cubic yards of blended substrate — topsoil, organic humus and compost, raised-bed mix, and peat — donated by Sea Friends, then top-dressed with shredded cedar mulch.
The planting
On April 29, students from the Environmental Justice and Horticulture Clubs placed all 58 plants in a naturalistic drift design, applied a mycorrhizal starter, and mulched the bed. Twelve surplus blue-eyed grass plugs went home with them.
Native, and unmistakably tended.
The design answers the most common objection to native plantings — that they look unkempt. Laid out in drifts, labeled, and mulched, this reads as a garden, not a weed patch.
Fourteen species, chosen for the site.
All plants are Long Island ecotype natives, propagated from locally collected seed. A representative selection of the palette, grouped by the job each species does:
Milkweed — monarch host
Nectar & pollinator forage
Structure & spring bloom
Groundcover & edge
A certified Monarch Waystation.
The completed planting was registered with Monarch Watch on May 1, 2026. Its 21 milkweed plants — across three Long Island ecotype species — more than double the program’s ten-plant minimum, and the bed meets every habitat requirement: shelter, host plants, diverse nectar sources for breeding and migration, and sustainable management.
It is listed in the national registry as the Freeport High School Environmental Justice Club habitat.
A partnership, on the ground.
Sea Friends Inc.
Project design, educational programming, and all plant, soil, and material funding.
FHS Environmental Justice Club
Build collaboration and planting. The certified waystation is registered in the club’s name.
FHS Horticulture Club
Planting day and hands-on native plant ecology.
FHS Woodshop
Construction and on-site installation of the cedar raised bed.
Your site could be the next one.
A courtyard, a strip of lawn, a public space — if you’ve got ground that could be habitat, we want to work with you.
Bring us a site