April 2004 - Margaret Suman

This month, opportunities have come up to work with additional conservation and school groups, so we are booking lots of upcoming visits from Portobello School (ages 5-10), Otago Horticulture Polytechnic students, and the Botanical Society. All with different interests and levels of learning. Some we are hoping to assist and some that we know we will learn from.

Nursery and Reserve visits
We've also been busy looking into how other nurseries and reserves operate.

Anita and I thought we would start locally and visit a well-known commercial nursery (Ribbonwood), a community nursery (Shetland Street Community Nursery) and an educational nursery facility (Otago Polytechnic Horticulture Department), all very different from one another but all three very useful to our purposes. In talking to commercial nurseries you realize how quantity and time are so very important, community nurseries are as much about volunteers as they are about plants and academic facilities are all about learning. We gained an unbelievable amount of experience from all three and they all gave us ideas for improving the YEPT nursery.

In addition to local nurseries, we ventured north to one of the more successful reserves on the North Island, Tiritiri Matangi. We were amazed in what can happen in just 10 short years in a warmer climate than our own. And the bird life was amazing!

Catlins Visit
We then went down to the Catlins for the day with, YEPT Project Officer, David Blair and Ranger, Dave McFarlane. The trip was multifaceted. We wanted to collect seeds, assess the site and check on number of penguins and the two Daves wanted to visit with a farmer who had a beautiful piece of land where cattle were eating the native bush and disturbing nesting penguins.

The Trust has been building up the relationship with the farmer for quite some time, but now that we have the personnel and time, we were able to make arrangements to help the penguins by fencing off the gully to protect them from the cattle. The beach was one of the loveliest areas we have seen and its great to know that the penguins there will now be able to raise their chicks without being trampled by sheep and cattle.

We also visited another farmer at Waikawa heads. He had been having trouble with people bringing dogs onto the beach which were disturbing yellow-eyed penguins, Dave and Dave arranged to install a "No Dogs Allowed" sign as well as repair a damaged fence.

Additional Happenings
To get a head start on the spring months and to test out new ways of producing plants for the Trust, we have been sowing seeds a little earlier this year. We are also trying different and rare species that we have not grown before but would be wonderful to have back onto the habitats. We have wanted to try this for a long time but with time constraints we have been unable to do so. Thanks to the Vodafone New Zealand Foundation, this year we can spend more time at the nursery doing this and we will benefit from this work for many years to come.

We are also planning some physical improvements to the nursery and have been busy researching shade houses, getting bids from plumbers and electricians, designing potting benches to customize our nursery for different community groups we are expecting this year.

Now it is time for us to buckle down and prepare for the winter.

Until next time… Margaret and Anita

<< back