2 mm of rain fell overnight. It threatened to rain all day but didn’t. The temperature was cool and activity on the wetland seemed to slow with the drop in degrees.
The great excitement of the weekend is over. The Mighty Hawks won the premiership – no, this is not a new bird for the wetland but Rod’s passion, Australian rules footy. Rod managed to buy two tickets for ‘The G’, so we went to the match in Melbourne. The G rocked with excitement full to the brim with 100,012 people screaming, singing, chanting and clapping for their team. It was an amazing experience, topped off with a 26 point win over Geelong. The hawks were magnificent, the cats defeated – not a bad result for us environmentally-minded folk.
We returned home to see our resident owl on his favourite horizontal branch, keeping an eye out probably for mice, rabbits or other tasty tid-bits.
Over the last few days we sighted a Bronze-wing pigeon and heard the rhythmic cooing of a Wonga pigeon. To-day a galah flew in to the wetland for a few sips at waters-edge – we usually see them grazing in the short grass.
Curiously we havn’t seen currawongs for a couple of weeks and also Bower birds have been scarce. Maybe they have gone off to mate and hatch eggs? No doubt they’ll return to ravage the vegetable patch. On the other hand, king parrots have been in the garden. There was a troop of 8 recently and today I spotted one of the juveniles chomping on just-set fruit of the plum tree. Grrr.
I was on radio 3CR on Sunday morning. I contribute intermittently when I happen to be in Melbourne on a Sunday. We talked mulch. People always want to know which mulch is the best and which one to use.
The difficulty is, of course, that there is not a clear answer. It depends… I will choose a certain mulch to do a certain job. As far as the wetland is concerned, during its restoration a lot of ground was disturbed. Topsoil was removed, stockpiled, and then replaced on completion.
During the first year, we had an explosion of colonising weeds such as thistles. We tried our best to manage them without using herbicide. We sliced their tap roots below ground with a spade (to prevent the crown from re-growing) and removed flowering stems (to prevent seed dispersal). However, there were some sites on the island that we simply didn’t get to.
In the second year native grasses made a come-back and covered the bare ground. This effectively reduced the thistle re-seeding to a minimum, simply because grass had covered the ground and prevented germination. Thistles on the island, however, had also reduced (with little intervention from us). Perhaps we could have saved ourselves a lot of effort by allowing natural processes to evolve !
Our philosophy has been to plant little, let nature take her course, selectively remove plants that are inappropriate but manage weeds. If we do plant, then the ground is mulched using coarse eucalypt chips for about 400 mm around the new plant and about a depth of 50 mm. Research has shown that mulching using ANY material is better than not mulching. So, the choice of type of mulch is not critical. We use eucalypt mulch because it is readily available (it comes from fallen trees mulched on site), is clean (no brought in weed seed), and it has been well composted (it has been lying in the heap for over 3 months).
The reason for mulching is mainly to prevent seeds germinating around the young plant and competing for water and nutrients. Most people think that mulching reduces evaporation of water from the soil (which it does to some extent), but really the better reason for mulching is to reduce competition from other plants. Plants transpire much more water than evaporates from the soil. An organic coarse grade mulch with variable sized chunks is good for us because: it takes a long time to break down (reduces maintenance), allows water to penetrate and doesn’t crust to form an impervious layer. In our situation we are not looking for the mulch to add nutrients on decomposition – we want it to suppress weeds and be around for a while until the young plants grow.
It is so important to cover the bare ground.
Progress on the picnic shelter
The boys put in a full day building and painting today. It’s starting to take shape. The roof is ready for the roofing iron. That will be delivered next week.
