Our Initiatives
Our Initiatives
What We Do
Outreach
A community garden is more than a place to grow vegetables & flowers—it’s a place where friends & neighbors reconnect with the natural world. It’s a living classroom where people of all ages come together to experience the rhythms of the seasons, the joy of growing plants from seed, & the rewards of being part of the nature’s cycle of renewal. It’s a place where we can grow in tandem with the plants that we cultivate.
Heritage Garden
Squash, tomatoes, salad greens, sugar snaps, melons, strawberries, cucumbers, peppers, onions, & much, much more. By mid-summer, our baskets will be overflowing with fresh vegetables, fruits & herbs, all 100% organic & grown in the Good Ground Heritage Garden at St. Joseph’s Villa. In a good year, we’ll harvest more than 1,500 pounds of this fresh produce, almost all of which will be donated to the Food Pantry at St. Rosalie’s Church in Hampton Bays.
Pollinators, Hives & Honey
At ECI we are taking a holistic approach to encouraging diversity in our pollinators. We are committed to providing habitat space for our native pollinators, in the form of open sandy ground, logs & stumps in wooded areas and leaving perennials unpruned to allow for overwintering spaces.
Zero Waste/Composting
Community composting is an essential part of what we do at ECI. It’s one more way we show our commitment to help improve our local environment one shovelful of organic compost at a time.
In 2025, we produced more than 7,000 pounds of organic compost – Southampton Black Gold is what we call it -- most of which was fed directly back into the soil of the Heritage Garden.
ECI Apiary & Beekeeping
At ECI we have an apiary containing six locally sourced strains of honeybee colonies. The colonies are managed under the guidance of Master Beekeeper, Chris Kelly, owner of Promise land Apiaries based in Mattituck. These hives serve as a functional resource—supporting the pollination of the Good Ground Heritage Garden—and as a valuable outreach educational tool for our community.
Seed Library
Establishing a seed library is an important step on the path to building a more environmentally sustainable community. Our goal is to establish a local network of seed savers who create & sustain plant varieties that are well adapted to our particular climate & conditions. Doing this increases biodiversity & helps mitigate the loss of plant gene integrity due to the genetic engineering of commercially produced seeds and plants.