The Climate Ready team within YAN mapped out the plant trial layout at the two trial sites which are located in Murrumbateman and Kangiara during January 2021. Each trial site has at least twenty blocks which include plantings of Eucalyptus melliodora, Acacia deanei and Dodonaea viscosa. Further details on the trial layout can be viewed here. The planting layouts at the Murrumbateman and Kangiara properties can also be viewed.
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”
