One area of the park that the Friends of Tarra Bulga are monitoring carefully is an area that has been set back by the occurrence of the Black Saturday bush-fires. The site is on a north-west facing slope and is an area of about 10 ha.It was added to the National Park in 1986 which was part of the process of the merging of the Bulga Park and Tarra Valley reserves. At that time it was in very poor condition, having being abandoned after being cleared for farming. It was reportedly covered in blackberries, introduced grasses and native colonisers such as Fireweed Groundsel and Bracken Fern.
Tag: seed
Sycamore Maple Revegetation Site
Made the trek out to the re-vegetation site for the first time since the planting was done which was a bit over two months ago.
From looking around the site there was both good and bad news. First the good, there was virtually no sign of any Wallabies managing to get to chew any of the new seedlings, despite the fact I heard one hopping away when I reached the site. There was good fresh new growth on all the seedlings that I found, hopefully when they become more conspicuous as they get taller the wallabies will still find them too difficult to reach. The bad news is that after seeing very, few new seedlings of Sycamore Maple
Annual Maple Pull
On Saturday March the 31st the friends held their annual Sycamore Maple pull. It was very encouraging to see that although there were still quite a number of large seedlings (up to 2.5m tall) and a bit of re-sprouting from previous weeding efforts. There was only a handful of new seedling sprouting (despite the wet seasons we have had) compared to the hundreds that we were pulling out when we first started working on this site back in 2006.
The source of the infestation was from some large established trees planted on the other side of the Tarra Valley Road. The large trees for many years had blown their light papery seeds into the surrounding native forest. Thanks to our efforts in starting the work in the park and with co-operation with the WGCMA and Parks Victoria, work was done to remove these large established trees, The photo above shows a large tree maple that was ringbarked and poisoned. Now all that should be required to stop the maple from spreading into the the magnificent forests of Tarra Bulga is a quick bit of regular follow up to eliminate any seedlings that pop up from viable seed still stored in the soil or regrowth of plants that we have already pulled out.
Sycamore Maple Removal
Fortunately we did not find to many plants that had re-grown but it was apparent that the ones that did resprout were generally not cut off very close to the ground. So the lesson learnt “cutting the stems as close to the ground as possible is vital”.
