Landcare nurseries within the Yass Area Network are well into the sowing and growing phase of tube stock for the region's Climate Ready project. Three species are being grown: Eucalyptus melliodora, Dodonaea viscosa subsp. angustissima, and Acacia deanei.  Each nursery sowed 1000 tubes with local seed plus 1000 tubes with seed sourced from regions across eastern Australia where the plant grows in a hotter-drier and cooler-wetter regions. Germination rates varied across the three plants so this was a significant milestone which had to be managed. The Climate Ready team will be planting Eucalyptus melliodora, Dodonane viscosa and Acacia deanei in a specific format at two sites - one in Kangiara and one in Murrumbateman once there is good soil moisture in Autumn 2021.  Further blogs will be written over the life of this project.

Yass Landcare Group's walk in the Mundoonen Nature Reserve on Saturday 28th November included a visit to the old Charcoal Pits. Kate Wilson found this beautiful poem by Jane Baker about the site, bringing to life some local history:

Mundoonan Charcoal Pits

In the silence of the bush

the charcoal pits grow old.

Wind and frost have stripped

black carbon stains from their

hewn rock walls, softened now by

tapestries of moss and lichen.

Leaf fall and forest debris

disguise the depth of these pits

where string-thin men stoked

and sweated in calico shirts

above dusty trousers belted low

and tucked into broken boots.

The bush has long swallowed

the blue spiral of charcoal smoke,

and eaten both the timber props

and steel pickets left by lonely men

surviving only in sepia photographs

that curl like fern fronds.

Now wallabies pad through gullies

generations removed from the scream of

the two-banded saw and the double bounced

thump of felled timber, as the bush

quietly and firmly reclaims the pits.

By Jane Baker

From her recently published book “That Other World”