Recently Elizabeth Goodfellow - member of the Bowning Bookham Landcare Group and YAN Climate Ready Revegetation Project Manager spoke at the ACT Environmental Volunteers Conference. This conference united volunteers, community organisations, experts, and policy makers, fostering idea exchange, experience sharing, and mutual learning. 

Under the theme "Resilient Environments, Resilient Communities," the event delved into innovative approaches, local insights, and cutting-edge research in environmental conservation. It addressed climate change challenges and nurtured a sense of connection with nature. 

Elizabeth was the speaker at the popular session on how the ACT and its surrounding region can become climate ready. Highlighting YANs climate ready revegetation project and how YAN can work together with groups across the region to prepare for the future. 

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More information about the Climate Ready Revegetation Project can be found here

Boorowa Landcare group hosted an inspiring afternoon for regional grazing groups to get their heads together and plan how we can work to help support farmers and graziers. Members of the Bowning Bookham Landcare Group’s Landcare on Farms grazing group ideated with other passionate groups to swap ideas, thoughts and create plans on how we can assist each other in the common goal of caring for the land we work and which supports our agricultural businesses. 

Through collaborative efforts like this we are working together to ensure the food and fibre we are producing from our farms is done in a way which is both sustainable, profitable, and better for the consumer and community as a whole. 

Our Landcare on Farms group has a solid calendar of activities planned for the coming months. If you are interested in joining the Landcare on Farms Group on-farm, please feel free to email [email protected] for all the details. 

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More About the Landcare on Farms group

The Bowning Bookham Landcare group invites farmers and graziers in the district to join the Landcare on Farms group. This is an active and passionate group of farmers who is working and learning together to better their farm businesses, the properties that they run and the landscape as a whole. 

The group meets regularly throughout the year with farm walks and other formal activities and training. The group aims to share ideas, help members plan and manage the upcoming season and provide peer support in decision making and problem solving. 

A sunny winters day saw a wonderful group of volunteers join in our Community Planting Day. Over 300 native plants were carefully planted and protected by this industrious group and all before lunchtime! 

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This new planting aims to join the remnant vegetation along the Black Range road to other larger areas of remnant vegetation throughout the property and beyond allowing wildlife to move along this corridor, provide habitat to birds and insects and also providing shelter for the livestock on the property.

We would like to extend a huge thank you to those who joined us on the day and our nursery volunteers who propagated and cultivated the tube stock used in these plantings. 

We were blown away by the incredible enthusiasm from our community members with individuals of all ages working together towards a common goal.

Thank you again to everyone who participated in this wonderful event!

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This Community Planting Day is a part of the Bowning Bookham Landcare Groups  Habitat Hops: From Burrinjuck to Bango Project. For more information or to get involved please click here.

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Over the last four years Yass Landcare and more recently Gunning Landcare had been rolling out mesh tree guards to protect the planting of paddock trees from livestock.  The Yass Paddock tree project has seen 1600 Paddock tree packages delivered and installed by participating landholders.  The Trees – Eucalyptus were all locally grown in a regional Landcare nursery and are on our list of plants which we expect to thrive in a changing climate.  

Landholders participating in this project have increased the number of Paddock tree packages which could be delivered through Landholder contributions.  Below are some photos of protected paddock trees, several years after planting.  Some of the photos demonstrate the importance of adding new trees- Eucalyptus into the landscape as the photos show large distances between existing paddock trees.   

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Proposed addition to the Paddock Tree model

In the past Yass Area Network was part of a larger revegetation project lead by Damon Oliver, NSW Department of Planning and Environment, to provide new habitat and food sources for Superb Parrots which migrate through this region.  In that project the concept of fencing off mature paddock trees in a circle several metres from the tree was introduced.  This approach enabled the planting of a range of understory plants around the mature paddock tree.  This enabled several beneficial things:

-       such as bringing in the insect eating birds which are often the ones that help decrease amounts of dieback by small birds leaf gleaning pests like lerps etc;

-       the introduction of new shrubs also provides extra habitat and food resources for our wildlife.  The absence of shrubs in our landscapes is now less than 5-10% of our Box Gum Grassy Woodlands thus setting up new shrub islands is critical. 

-       as well as being a wildlife habitat and food source, this type of tree protection and planting reduces soil compaction from stock, increase soil biota, improve symbiotic interactions between roots etc, and overall boost the trees' health significantly. 

Building a tree circle is easy and the 4 images in sequence show you how simple the process is – by using “maxloc” or "stiff stay” netting fencing which doesn’t concertina and with a heavier gauge wire top and bottom there is no need for single wires. The netting can simply be attached top, middle and low down onto each iron post with tie wire. Note the iron posts leaning out a little and the netting is loosely strained with strainers.

Thus ideas from one region can be readily adopted and made to work in other regions – you just need to be open to new ideas and use local regional plants. So in the future our regional Landcare groups will add this mode of planting to our revegetation tool case to create new biodiverse hot spots to assist wildlife migration through the landscape – are you open to that idea?

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