September Working Bee – sowing below Alexandra Street

Please come along and enjoy helping us re-establish creek-side and flood-plain habitat!  We’ll be working again on “our new patch”, the public land downstream of Alexandra Street, Campbells Creek.

Date: Sunday 18th of September

Times: 10:00 a.m.- 12:00 p.m.

Description

This area was neglected for decades, but we’re now into our third year of working towards its restoration and have had great success with eradicating weeds of national significance like blackberry, gorse and crack willow.  We’ve also killed off nearly all of the herbaceous weeds and with the site now having excellent weed control, it’s well prepared for revegetation.  Today we’ll be direct sowing wattles, brush seeding bottlebrush and paperbark and broadcast sowing summer active native grasses.

You can see a list of the species we’ll be planting here.  Following the links there will take you to photos and descriptions.

Brush seeding is where whole branches of woody plants that retain their seed are cut and distributed across the site.  We’ll be using Rough-barked Honey-myrtle (Melaleuca parvistaminea) and Scarlet Bottlebrush (Callistemon rugulosus) harvested from a private garden.  As the branches dry out, they release seed from their capsule “fruits” and if the conditions stay moist, we can get very low-cost recruitment of new plants.  It’s a gamble, but with the weather continuing wet and a La Niña event forecast, this year looks promising.

While there’s no evidence these two species existed along Campbells Creek before colonisation, they occur not far away within North Central Victoria.  The Melaleuca is known from Yandoit, Franklinford, Heathcote and Bendigo.  We’ve been using it in our revegetation for decades and it self-recruits, often quite some distance from parent plants. The Callistemon has been noted in Bendigo and our source plants were propagated from parents growing on the banks of the Bullabul Creek at Arnold.  So far, we’ve only tried the Callistemon in one place in the creekside public land, where it established well from brush seeding.

We think it wise to explore using plants indigenous to nearby localities that have climates more like the hotter and drier conditions forecast to happen with climate change.

Direct sowing of the wattles should be very easy this year.  With all the rain, the ground should be very soft, and it’s likely we’ll only need to scratch the soil a bit and scatter the seeds on top.

We’ll also experiment with broadcast sowing summer active native grass species.  These species have a different photosynthetic metabolism that means they cope better with hot, dry conditions.  If the weather keeps moist during spring and summer, they germinate and grow very quickly.

Meet: here at the west end of National School Lane, Campbells Creek for a 10:00 a.m. start.  There’s plenty of space for car parking.

Wear: gloves (important!), sturdy footwear (gumboots are advised) and clothing suitable for the weather.

Bring your own drinking water if you need it.  If you can, please bring a bow saw or pruning saw.

We’ll supply everything else, including light refreshments afterwards.

Hope to see you there!