Well, it has been a whole term since we last went down to Hamanatua Stream to weed and mulch around the native plants down there..... and the weeds are winning! Argh.
Today, we had to move a whole lot of mulch, but we had to weed around our natives first. We kind of got set up into a weeding team and a mulching team because that's just what needed to be done. We are learning a lot from Kauri Forno who worked hard with R1 last year. They have set the scene for us to follow this year.
We were pretty glad though to see that even though the fennel had got tall again, it was nowhere near the height it was when we first started! Back then, we couldn't really even see if there were natives anywhere amongst the fennel.
Some of the natives we are looking after are:
flax, kawakawa, ngaio, whau and pohutukawa. We want them to grow big and strong. The weeding helps the plants to do this and the mulch keeps water in and the roots warm over winter.
MLH are committing to going down to our awa every second Friday this term to make sure we keep on top of all that fennel!! We hope that some community members will come along and help us out too. We will have to create some posters to encourage our community whanau and so that they are learning as well! It feels really good to share our knowledge and new learning of this important part of our school environment.
On 27 February our Shade House Crew had the opportunity to work with members of the public to propagate seeds from Titirangi/Kaiti Hill with Kauri Forno.
They met at the Summit Carpark and learnt about how the new trees had been planted and that the time was right to propagate/collect seeds from these trees to grow new ones in the nursery at EIT. These will grow in shadehouses and then when they are bigger and ready - they will be planted back on Kaiti Hill.
