It's All About the Pine Barrens!

I am Cathy Antener, owner/publisher of pineypower.com, and author of Discovering "New Jersey's Pine Barrens," published by The History Press (now Arcadia Publishing.) I'm a Jersey Girl who has lived in the NJ Pine Barrens area for about 40 years. I grew up in Red Bank in Monmouth County and moved into the Pine Barrens of Lakehurst in 1978. A change of lifestyle led me to the Waretown/Barnegat area in 1982. In 1996, I began publishing a Pine Barrens website, to become PineyPower.com in 1998. I now live in the western area of Barnegat NJ with my rescued dogs: a Standard Poodle, "Goodtime Charlie,"and a Cattle Dog mix, "Nala," along with all the critters in my big wooded backyard.

While I can't claim the honor of centuries of ancestry here in the pines (I'm only a 4th generation American, of Swiss-Austrian-English descent), I nonetheless have a thirst for knowledge about the area, and find that the more I know, the less I know! History, geography, economy, horticulture, ecology, geology, biology, botany and even art and literature are all alive and well here, and there's always a lot to learn on every subject!

I honed my basic knowledge of the Pine Barrens while I was employed by the Ocean County Department of Parks and Recreation, where I was a member of the first - and several subsequent - "Pine Barrens Jamboree" planning committees. I also spent a lot of time assisting in the development of several County Parks, including Wells Mills County Park in Waretown, Patriots' County Park in Jackson, and Eno's Pond County Park in Forked River. I worked in cooperation with both the NJ Pinelands Commission and the NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection in the course of my 18 years with Ocean County. After a six-year hiatus (actually selling real estate full time), I decided to make my Pine Barrens passion my livelihood. I now devote myself entirely to PINEYPOWER! I owned and operated "PineyPower Tours" for over eight years, where I coordinated and led large group tours of the Pine Barrens, including cranberry harvest, blueberry harvest, winery tours and history tours. Bus groups came from North Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and even Virginia, to learn about our beloved Pine Barrens!

Since letting my yard go "natural" (no fertilizers, herbicides or insecticides, and minimal watering) over the past 10 years, I've been suprised with the wildflowers cropping up! My yard is often the locale for many of my nature photos!