April 2008

This wouldn’t be our happiest newsletter.

It has been a hard year! Our plantings have suffered badly from the elements. Too wet in parts of the Steelway (swampy in parts).  We put in some drainage, but not enough as we found out later last winter. We have lost a number of trees, which we are endeavouring to replace with flaxes as they are more suitable for that area.

Heavy frost and wind on the Oakland and Watkins Road planting put paid to a large number of trees and now a drought has made more curl up their toes and die. The circles still stand out in what was empty paddocks and what trees have survived will be shelter for the replacement trees we plant this year.

We have lost trees that have been in the ground and doing very well for up to 10 years including some Rimu behind the Kauri Grove and in the Rimu in the Triangle on the Greenbelt on Taylor Street.

But hey this is nature; we just pick up the pieces and move right along. If you put a money value on some of the larger trees the cost would be $50.00 to $100.00 each. You can’t get that back, but we just have to start again and buy in what we can’t grow ourselves and make more plans.

We have made a start on the ‘River view” project, this will be a five year project as most of the bank is loose sand. We are bringing in heavier soil to place in retaining walled areas and hold the moisture for the trees we plant.

Due to the late start of the rain and not enough we have to delay planting so we are going to have less time to do it in.

The Friends of Maungakawa have been meeting at our depot, planning what they are going to do. Basically it is a poison programme for rats and opossum and trapping cats and stoats. We will support them in whatever way we can. We are disappointed at the lack of interest from the people of Cambridge.

Quite a lot of money has come in from our appeal to buy rare trees and we won’t say no, to any more. Thank you to those people for the donations.

Last year January to December we had 118 Corrections Department Teams which we found work for. Each team comes with a supervisor and there are usually 10 in each team.

This year we have had 64 teams since 3rd of January. They use our nursery facility as the base while they work in our town.

Sometimes they do some nursery work like potting up or weeding or cleaning up. Mostly they are out in the field working on one or more areas we have under our planting plan or doing jobs we get asked by Council department staff to do; things like clear the Swale of rubbish, clear slips on tracks, sweep leaves from tacks, pick up rubbish from riverbank parks, plant trees on slips in Karapiro Stream area, and more. They even have been building retaining walls to prevent the sandy soil on the Riverbank slipping down onto the new Soldiers track.

We couldn’t achieve what we have without them and they enjoy coming as they get a variety of work and learn skills other than weeding or scrub cutting.

Not only do they help in the preparation of areas to plant but last year they did a lot of the work in the building of the Steelway Track. We organize the necessary equipment or gear and show them how each job is to be done and cart stuff around to sites etc.

The Tuesday group is still working away doing all sorts of summer jobs around the place, to be ready to go when planting starts.

Even in summer there is lots to do at the nursery; weeding and potting on, pruning and harvesting and planting seeds for the next crop of trees and attending to cuttings and taking new ones.

Also some of our tradesmen have been working on ways to improve the smooth running of the nursery by building new and interesting accessories.

There have been weed spraying expeditions, and group weeding tramps, that have inspected last year’s plantings and pruned trees that tend to lean too far over some of the tracks.

We are all getting keen to start putting our babies out in the big wide world so on the 8th of April we set out with 110 low grasses and flax and a big tank of water and added the back row to the top of Pope Terrace weed mat.

What was planted last year and the year before are spreading out to cover the weed mat but we still have gaps. Some have done extremely well; a few died in the drought and so the replanting. It is mainly grasses and flaxes and Hebes interspersed with Kowhais, Kakabeaks and a few coloured Coprosma.