3. City of
Nedlands
Each January we
meet with City of
Nedlands
bushcare Officer
(Vicki Shannon)
to
•review bushland
management and
plan priorities.
•submit activity
plan for coming
year
•agree on what
each of us will do
4. Veldgrass
City of Nedlands
sprays as much
of the bushland
with Fusilade
Forte as the
budget allows.
We follow up
each summer
by removing
any plants that
have survived.
We record using
GPS patches
that need
spraying.
5. Miscellaneous
weeds
We remove
anything we can
(eg patches of
Fountain Grass)
and scattered
pelargonium.
We note (using
GPS) any weeds
we can’t deal
with – eg large
patches of
pelargonium –
for City to bring
in EcoJobs or
similar.
13. Bulbous
Weeds
City of Nedlands
sprays bulbous
weeds – freesia
and lachenalia.
We follow up by
removing
isolated plants
missed by
sprayers – and
note (with GPS)
any patches
that need
spraying.
Shenton Bushland is a 21ha A-Class reserve vested in the City of Nedlands following a campaign by the Friends of Shenton Bushland to save it from the bulldozer. The Friends of Shenton Bushland now look after the bushland in collaboration with the City of Nedlands. An adjacent 5 hectares of bushland is held by the Health Department, and is also looked after by the Friends of Shenton Bushland in collaboration with the Health Department and the City of Nedlands
The collaboration between the Friends of Shenton Bushland and the City of Nedlands is based on an agreement that requires us to submit an activity plan each year for approval. The City of Nedlands has a budget for management of its bushland reserves, and allocates that budget according to the needs of each reserve.
Our weed control activities are based on recommendations arising from the EWAN project in which Kate Brown worked with our group to develop an evidenced-based strategy for weed control covering most of the major weeds. We continue to liaise with Kate and other officers at the UrbanNature team for advice on our bushland management strategies. This usually occurs at the end of the year when we review the past year and plan for the coming year. With Veldgrass the strategy is to spray as much of the bushland as possible (subject to the budget), and hand weed during summer.
We have a number of miscellaneous weeds scattered throughout the bushland that we remove whenever we encounter them – fountain grass, pelargonium, victorian tea-tree, flinders ranges wattles. Where the weed infestation is too large to tackle by hand we note the location using GPS for the City of Nedlands to deal with – or we might come back at another time
With the Veldgrass hand removal we cruise through the bushland removing scattered plants and recording infestations for spraying next year. It is a great opportunity to visit parts of the bushland we don’t otherwise spend much time in, and identify any potential weeds or unexpected things – it is a great way to get to know more about the bushland.
This year, our veldgrass hand weeding is focusing on the south and west areas of the bushland which have not been sprayed in the preceeding winter.
We do not do much planting in the bushland because looking after plantings is a time-consuming activity. However, planting is a good way to involve the wider community. We are also thinking that we might plant out one problem area ‘the barrens’ – which was a highly degraded area that we would like to keep people out of because of possible asbestos – so we are collecting Banksia Sessilis seeds to spread there – hopefully it will provide food for Carnaby’s cockatoos which seem to like it.
Once the winter rains come, our focus shifts onto the bulbous weeds that begin to emerge. In response to advice from Kate’s EWAN project, the City of Nedlands is controlling Freesia and Lachenalia with herbicide. We tend to hand weed isolated plants that are likely to be missed by the sprayers because they are close to natives and hard to spray. We map any large patches with a GPS to advise the City where to send the contractors.
Geraldton Carnation weed is mostly hand weeded. It is problematic because each time it rains we get a fresh crop coming up, so areas often have to be visited several times each winter and spring. Our strategy is based on Bradley method – we tend to work around the edges of large patches and work towards the middle to stop it spreading. We try to make sure that no individuals survive to drop seeds. We are not sure whether our strategy is working!
One of the things that Kate did with us during the EWAN project was set up a series of monitoring quadrats for problem weeds. This is the Freesia monitoring quadrat location information and monitoring for 2001 and 2002. We might need to set up some monitoring sites for Geraldton Carnation Weed to check on how we are going.
This is the monitoring site location information for Lachenalia. One of our challenges is to continue with monitoring the sites – it is hard to find botanists who have time to do this kind of work in spring-time which is often the busiest time of year.
We have a number of minor weeds (in other words, infestations that are quite small). Some of these, such tend to have bulbules that need care when removing the bulb from the soil so they are quite time consuming to weed, and we end up with a lot of soil to remove.
Black flag is one weed we don’t know how to control. Kate and the UrbanNature team have done some trails with chemical control trials at one location.
October is also the month we go around doing our photo monitoring – also after events such as the March 2010 hail storm.
We keep a blog to keep Vicki Shannon and our members informed about our activities – though looking at the live traffic feed, most of our visitors are from overseas!
We also upload our GPS data to the web so that Vicki can download the data – for example, in this case we found some people camping in the bushland – a Council Ranger was sent in to remove the camp.
For the visit to the bushland this afternoon, we thought you might like to consider some of the challenges we are looking at in the bushland: what to do with The Barrens? (highly degraded, contains asbestos, expensive to remove) what to do with the POW Mounds? (constant source of weed infestationsinto the bushland) what to do with Black Flag? (difficult to deal with using either chemicals or hand weeding)
