Operation Restoration
Weed Bash Success!
The Weed Bash was full of celebration last month when various Weed Warrior crews and Community Gardeners removed about 15 woolsacks of weeds from community spaces and backyards!
The target weed for the Weed Bash - Banana Passionfruit Vine (Passiflora tripartita) was the top of the list for removal - a highly invasive weed, with many plants removed from backyards. Banana Passionfruit Vine is a climber, climbing onto trees, eventually smothering them. Keep on look out for a plant with three lobed leaves, pink, tubular hanging flowers when flowering and banana-shaped fruit that ripen from green to yellow or black.
For more information about Banana Passionfruit Vine - check out the Weedbusters website here.
At the North East Valley Community Garden, the Community Gardeners with their double gloved hands made a great start on tackling the Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus agg.) patch behind the garden. Blackberry is a scrambling, thorny (ouch) shrub that produces clusters of black berries from November to May. Blackberry forms dense clumps that can last for years, scrambling over the ground smothering mostly low growing species. Blackberry can also inhibit the establishment of native seedlings - as well as making movement through areas difficult - and painful!
For more information about Blackberry - check out the Weedbusters website.
Elsewhere in the Valley, a local land owner and a small crew planted out a wetland and adjacent riparian strip to help create some good quality habitat for any nearby native wildlife. Further down the creek, at the Bowling Club, a small crew 'released' (clearing weeds around plants to prevent smothering) the plants that had been planted at previous Spring Clean events.
Instead of the weeds going to landfill, the local goats on a farm up the hill got their fill!
Thank you to all of the Weed Warrior volunteers, community members working in their own backyards, the Kai Share team for our awesome feast on the day and to our funders who make these events possible! Te Ao Tūroa: Dunedin's Environment Strategy, the ECOfund and Lotteries Environment and Heritage!
