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Gathering Place, Carwoola |
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Molonglo River Restoration at Gathering Place, Carwoola by Rose-Marie Johnson
Half the grant was paid when the application was approved and the other half on completion of the project, about a year later. The grant assisted with the cost of fencing about a hundred metres on each side of the creek bed and putting in gates for functional access and extra troughs (because a paddock was split). To revegetate the roughly twenty metre wide strip, Greening Australia provided a mixture of over two hundred local native trees, shrubs, grasses, rushes and sedges, also funded through the Molonglo Catchment Group, and to protect them, carton style tree guards with canes. The help of the Green Team volunteer group (plus my sister) for some planting one afternoon, and the extra plants they brought, were much appreciated. The extra plants helped to fill out the area which, in our enthusiasm, ended up being wider than originally planned on the steepest part. For the sake of completeness in rehabilitating the area, we are also pulling out briars and hawthorns but in stages, to retain some bird habitat while the prickly Bursaria grows. This is in addition to our usual weed control. We’ve had some losses during Winter, probably due to some
rather heavy frosts in combination with the drought. The Summers have been hard
seasons, with some unusually long, hot dry spells, so there were quite a few
losses, although we did do some watering the first year in an attempt to tide
them over the worst. We found a better survival rate for the ones planted with
bigger holes, water crystals and slow release fertilizer, so the extra effort
put into those was worthwhile.
There are still occasional losses so we have continued with replacement planting, but suppose that we’ll soon reach the stage of looking at what is there and being contented that it’s enough. It's been wonderful to watch the plants grow over the few years since we started the project, including the improved groundcover and increase in natural wildflowers and rock ferns, plus berries on the native raspberries, with the exclusion of stock. The area has gone from heavily grazed down due to the drought, to an impressive scattering of tree guards, to an attractive shrubby plantation with large, arching poa tussocks, where something is flowering much of the time. Also, it’s reassuring to know that the revegetation and stock exclusion are helping to stabilise the parts of the creek banks vulnerable to erosion. We're looking forward to having a shady tree-lined creek in a few years' time, which will act as a shelter belt for the adjacent paddocks. There were also some unexpected personal benefits of doing the project, in addition to the great satisfaction of improving our property and doing something for the environment. Being informed by Angela of the growing number of kilometres of Molonglo catchment being restored in similar projects, gave the added satisfaction of feeling like part of a much bigger picture. This was enhanced by contributing to promotional activities, including writing part of a newspaper article and giving a talk for the part of a local Landcare field day that involved a look at our completed project. In addition, we found we were in the loop to find out about free workshops and field days organised by Greening Australia and the Molonglo Catchment Group, so have become better at looking after our property by learning about soil chemistry and biology and learning about many of our paddock plants, including identification and their desirable or undesirable qualities. All the positive aspects far outweigh the relatively minor inconveniences of having a reduced area for grazing (we’ve managed fine so far) and having the paddock split so that our horses are some distance from the house yard for a few extra weeks each year. Indeed, we’re so happy with the first project that we’ve embarked on a second, even bigger riparian restoration project around the other half of our creek! |
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Fencing
off and planting along our creek had been on our wish list of things to do since
we moved to our property eighteen years before, so the incentive funding for
riparian restoration offered through the Molonglo Catchment Group seemed an
opportunity too good to miss. In response to our enquiry, Angela Calliess from
Greening Australia paid us a friendly visit, walked over the site with us and
helped prepare the application.
Late
in the first Summer we had a few of the heaviest downpours we’ve experienced in
two decades here, despite the drought, and a number of the low-lying plants were
swept away in the flood, as were many of the tree guards (and a section of fence
was knocked down). The Molonglo Catchment Group’s River Restoration Project has
been generous with the number of replacement plants and tree guards and it was
much easier to plant into already prepared holes. They also kindly allowed us to
mix their plants with the ones we bought for windbreaks elsewhere on the
property, and we planted some bought trees in the project area, increasing the
biodiversity of all our plantings. Our ongoing plantings have since benefited
from being in the loop to find out when there are free plants available, left
over from other Greening Australia activities, and being able to re-use most of
the canes with our own two litre cartons.