Reefcare had a fabulous turn up of 12 volunteers, which was fantastic given the inclement weather… we were actually getting organised with equipment with Jarrah from Dragonfly Environmental when we had a slight downpour, for which volunteers just put on their raincoats – what Trojans we have in our group!
Luckily it was only a 10 minute or so rain cloud and the rest of the day was fantastic. There was a pretty strong southerly, but working on the north side of the ridge this did not cause any problems. There was diverse working on site with a number of us (Izzy, Ivana, Claire, John, Josh, Maria, Jarrah and myself) working on getting rid of the non-native aggressive pigs face on the south
western side, leaving hopefully a base of deceased pigs face as erosion control and then vegetation matter for mulching we cleared a large area and put in some tube stock – and then we planted about 8 plants (which takes time as we need to build our terraces due to the sandy steep slope) before moving down to the bottom where Ivana and Josh tackled a couple of Bitou, whilst Izzy, John, Claire and I worked on Burr Medic and Jarrah and Maria along the track working mainly on Bidens and other weeds.
Julie worked on the high west slope on Bitou, whilst Des was also in that area planting. Merrilyn and Gen worked slightly lower than the big group targeting Bitou seedlings, general weeding and they had 6 plants for their area. Six of us met at the Outpost coffee shop in Ocean Grove afterwards where we chatted on a wide range of topics.
Photos – taken by John IslesTop: arriving on site in inclement weather.
Second: the pile we made after removing some of the non-native pigs face on the south western side of our site.
Photos – taken by Lisa Calder
Third: photo of the Pigs Face removal prior to then doing some planting in this areaFourth: The photo of the coastal rosemary shows that with good terracing (old branches of the removed bitou) and mulching – on this steep sandy slope that the plants can do really well and it is easy to see the green shoots and how this Coastal Rosemary is growing. This was planted in December – 2 months ago and still looking good on this steep slope.