Category Archives: trees

Yarnauwi Treefest 2019

10 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by in diy, ecology, regeneration, trees, waterways

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A serial tree-planter manages to synchronise his outfit with the colouring of Eucalyptus occidentalis.

A couple of days before this year’s tree planting, I rang our friend and regular tree-planter Jeremy, and told him that three out of four family members were sick with the flu and we were thinking of cancelling this year’s planting weekend. He didn’t accept that proposal, effectively telling us that tree planting would happen regardless of our involvement, that between his family and another they would take care of catering, rally the volunteers and get the trees in the ground.

It has always been an aspiration of ours that the farm might offer a place for people to be able to develop connection with the landscape through collaboration on land-based projects – “where people and the landscape can restore each other”. I hope that Jeremy’s response, and the support of our friends and community over the last seven years of tree-planting is an indication of this aspiration in development. In this spirit, this year we were also delighted to host regenerative side projects such as Steven Hoepfner’s seed ball regeneration experiment, and provide a waterway for Sue and David Speck’s sedges, and a forever home for Greg Wood’s trees.

Steven’s seed ball project: local provenance bundles of seed and nutrients distributed across revegetation zones to germinate when the conditions are right.

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Saltbush city limitless

14 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by in ecology, livestock, regeneration, trees

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At this time of year when it hasn’t rained properly for about 6 months and even the hardiest of our native trees and shrubs start to wilt, we say thank heavens for saltbush. This family of plants are the Australian climate change gardeners’ morale booster – the hotter and drier it gets the more they seem to leaf out, attract beneficial insects, tower in size over anything else and improve the conditions for other species.

The first species we have had success with, Old Man Saltbush (Atriplex nummularia), grows in inland areas of Australia. Its seeds were traditionally used as a food source for Aboriginal people, and the leaves are also edible and rich in protein, antioxidants, and minerals. It’s commonly used as a livestock grazing plant, which was one of the reasons we planted it, as a high-protein green fodder source at times of the year like this when there is not much else for stock to eat.

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Old Man Saltbush is extremely drought and salt tolerant and apparently lives for more than 100 years! It accumulates salt in its leaves as it extracts water from the soil so can help to reduce salinity. It is very deep rooted and can access moisture and nutrients out of reach of other plants, making those nutrients available to other surface plants via grazing. Its roots travel up to 5m deep and 10m wide to access nutrients and moisture, as well as having surface roots to collect light rain and bind soil. It also sequesters carbon in the soil.

It is fast growing so can provide shelter within a few years to other plants or stock, and works well grown as a hedge/windbreak. I am keen to grow it as a hedge border around a vegetable garden in future as it attracts beneficial insects as well as blocking wind. It seems to grow fine on our heavy clays, though I note it prefers the dryer ridge to the more low lying winter waterlogged areas. And it has such nice grey-blue shimmery leaves! And kangaroos don’t seem to touch it! So much to love. It really is a hero of the plant world.

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Woody trunk after 3 or 4 years growth

Another species we’ve been very grateful to be acquainted with is Creeping Saltbush (Atriplex semibaccata). We planted it on the disturbed slope next to our shed site as a way of stabilising the soil and avoiding erosion and it has thrived. It forms a dense low mat of up to 1.5m diameter, tolerates high levels of salinity and salt-laden winds, tolerates drought, has an edible berry, reduces soil temperature, and provides habitat for beneficial insects. On some of our hottest and driest summer days, it was green and covered in blue copper butterflies!

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Creeping away

And it now seems to be coming up “by itself” (maybe with the help of ants moving fruit around) in a couple of other spots around our shed, not minding growing in gravel at all. This year we are planning to plant it on our gully walls in the hopes of stabilising those slopes, increasing habitat and creating a living mulch around other trees and shrubs.

 

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Colonising the shed site

Finally, we are always overjoyed to see Ruby Saltbush (Enchylaena tomentosa) popping up by itself in various paddocks around the farm with no help from us (via birds or sheep perhaps). Again the small red fruits are edible, again it is ridiculously hardy tolerating drought, salt, and sand.  Sheep love eating it, but unfortunately they leave nothing behind! And the green leaves are such a sight for sore eyes in this driest time of year.

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We feel we have only just started on our journey experimenting with saltbush, and look forward to encouraging this family of perennial plants to be our allies on the path to increasing productivity and biodiversity.

Not ‘if’, but ‘when’: planning for fire

07 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by in ecology, planning, regeneration, trees

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Melted tree guard on a eucalyptus seedling.

A few evenings ago, someone set off fireworks on the road beside our property. Embers from the fireworks landed in the grass on the property boundary and quickly took, spreading through the dry summer grass along the fence and down a drainage line. Thankfully, our neighbours quickly noticed and set to work with their own fire unit while awaiting the arrival of the police and Country Fire Service. The blaze was contained with minimal damage, but it’s stimulated us to revisit our property plans and consider how we’re designing for the inevitability of fire.

Scorched earth and singed trees.

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Tree-fest 2018: Six years and growing

11 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by in ecology, propagation, regeneration, trees, waterways

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Volunteers planting at the very first Yarnauwi tree planting extravaganza, 2013

The work continues in 2018 with new plantings amid established trees.

Six years ago we first invited friends and family to come and plant trees at Yarnauwi. They came, dug holes in a windswept paddock, hunched their shoulders against the cold and ate lunch beneath one of the property’s two big old red gums. That first year most of the plants were devoured by kangaroos and deer. Amazingly, our friends and family came back the following year and every year since, with the tree-planting weekend growing into an annual celebration of moist ground and hope for the future.

Loyal volunteers work on a windbreak

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Yarnauwi: the First Five Years

07 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in art & craft, diy, ecology, events, history, regeneration, trees, waterways

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Towards the end of 2012 we first came to Yarnauwi Farm. The property at that time was a single paddock, carved up with junk-filled erosion gullies and with two regal, remnant red gums smeared up the hillside by the wind. However, set within a grand landscape of rolling hills and a couple of kilometres from the coast, there was something about it that captured our attention and our aspirations.

Five years later, the property is beginning to change. The survivors of annual tree planting are now heading skywards, most of the junk is gone, paddocks have been fenced, some erosion gullies are stabilising, sheep graze, fruit trees peek from the tops of tree guards and rain thunders on a shed roof. The last five years have brought with them an almost vertical learning curve, challenge, plenty of failures and the indescribable satisfaction of seeing seedlings become trees become woodland.

We’ve tried documenting this process online here at yarnauwi.com, but to celebrate this milestone we’ve also produced a limited edition book curating photos, illustrations and writings from the last five years.

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Yarnauwi: The First Five Years is divided into sections on the history of the property, trees and tree planting, creek restoration and erosion management, treasures extracted from the junk heaps, property planning, “obtaining a yield” and landscape change through the Fleurieu seasons. Each section is copiously illustrated with photographs and drawings and hopefully provides inspiration to others who are seeking to regenerate their own landscape or who have a connection with the spectacular landscape of the Fleurieu Coast. A number of sections contain “before-and-after” photographs of locations around the farm showing the impact of tree planting and low-tech erosion management strategies, predictably however, with a few decent summer downpours the changes were even more dramatic just a month or two after taking the final photographs!

It’s available for purchase now from our Etsy shop and we’ll also have a few copies available, together with sheepskins and farm- and Fleurieu-inspired artworks at the Second Valley Market from 10.00am-3.00pm on Saturday 27 January 2018.

Yarnauwi: The First Five Years
Softcover, 48 pages, full colour on premium satin paper.
Approximately 21.7cm x 28cm.

Kangaroo grazing and revegetation: looking for a way forward

01 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by in ecology, livestock, planning, regeneration, trees

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Western Grey Kangaroos fight it out in one of our revegetation habitat zones

One of the most persistent challenges in our work to revegetate areas of the farm has been managing kangaroos. Despite its previous status as woodland, for decades the farm has been an enforced grassland as hay paddock and pasture, the preferred environment of Western Grey Kangaroos. While early accounts of the region describe the southwestern Fleurieu as “kangaroo country”, land clearing, the elimination of predators such as dingoes, reduced hunting pressure, and in our case, the provision of year-round green pick in the form of a nearby irrigated golf course has contributed to a steady increase of kangaroo numbers.

We’ve observed that the kangaroos follow a seasonal rhythm of converging on our property in numbers during the cooler, wetter months, before dispersing into smaller family groups as the weather warms and dries. During this time, they typically move into the neighbouring golf course, and because of the constant availability of fresh feed it is rare to see a female kangaroo without a joey. While most species of kangaroos typically prefer grass, the Western Grey is also noted as a browser of shrubs and seedlings. Continue reading →

New poster: Imagining Yarnauwi before colonisation

13 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in art & craft, ecology, history, regeneration, trees, waterways

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Click to view a printable, A3 version of the poster.

Over the last few years, we’ve spent a great deal of time learning about the landscape of Yarnauwi, and the broader southwestern Fleurieu Peninsula. This has been essential for us in helping us to understand how the landscape works, and therefore how we can best work to ensure its health and function. We’re inspired by a statement from the 2015 Greenhorns New Farmer’s Almanac, where Connor Stedman writes, “Farms, forests, and grasslands can store and regenerate natural capital again, rebuilding the ecological fabric that is the ultimate source of our prosperity and survival. But to know how to undertake that stewardship, it’s not enough to know the land as it is now. We need to dig below the recent surface and go deeper – find the older ecological and cultural stories of a place. It’s the wildlands that hold these stories, and it’s these lands that will return them to us if we know where to look and how to listen. An agrarian economy needs to tend, restore and engage in a deep relationship with the wild as well as the planted field.”

In this spirit, in this poster we’ve tried to imagine and illustrate the landscape of Yarnauwi and the surrounding area as it may’ve appeared before colonisation. It summarises our reading and research, as well as our experiences exploring more intact local landscapes. It’s a work of imagination, it’s definitely not to scale, but we hope it helps communicate some of the complexity of a functioning landscape and the interactions of the Kaurna in maintaining its function and ecological health over millennia. Then, as now, the southwestern Fleurieu was a cultural landscape, maintained through intentional management practices. This poster is also an effort to acknowledge our own place in the long history of this landscape. Continue reading →

Time and change: revegetation inspiration

10 Monday Jul 2017

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Impatient as we are, we’ve become slightly obsessive about “before-and-after” photos in an effort to stay inspired about the possibilities for landscape transformation. About 15 minutes down the road from Yarnauwi, our friends David and Gillian have been gradually revegetating a former grazing property in the hills above Cape Jervis. Perhaps because of its steepness, the property has retained a good number of big old pink gums, together with the occasional ancient sheoak, offering the beginnings of a canopy for regeneration. Seven years ago we helped out with one of their first planting weekends, and I recently unearthed some photos taken at that time. With David, we recently walked around the property to admire the last seven years of growth.

View 1: 2010

View 1: 2017

David and Gillian have been philosophical about kangaroo grazing, with plants getting no more protection than korflute guards. Some plants have been repeatedly mowed down, reaching no higher than the tree guard after seven years, while others have finally stretched above mouth height and are now heading skywards. David notes that no plants were about adult should height for the first five years – something we can relate to at Yarnauwi. Continue reading →

The Fifth Annual Tree Planting Extravaganza

25 Sunday Jun 2017

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“Trees are the poems the earth writes upon the sky” said Kahlil Gibran. Pete, Shani and Sophie prepare to plant.

This year is our fifth on Yarnauwi, and this June saw our fifth annual tree-planting extravaganza. Over the last five years, our amazing community of tree planters and supporters have planted 5000 trees and other plants on Yarnauwi as we work to restore woodland, stabilise and repair erosion and plant trees for future timber, forage and food. Following the last four years of observation and experimentation, in 2017 our main focus was planting carefully selected species into some of the more challenging areas of the property. Each year we’ve propagated and planted trees sourced from both Trees for Life and our own seed collection. In addition to their generous labour and time, we’re honoured that Yarnauwi regulars Richard and Marg have now immortalised the annual tree-planting tradition in a musical saga, published below and sung to the tune of Loudon Wainwright’s The Swimming Song. The lyricists also pre-emptively apologise for any character assassination contained within.

Putting in soil-stabilising groundcovers around the shed.

A week or two following the tree-planting extravaganza, we were delighted to host the Permaculture Association of South Australia for a walking tour and lunch, sharing our property planning process and how we’ve approached the landscape restoration through a permaculture lens – of which these plantings are a central element. Thank you to Tree Team 2017: Anthony, Pete, Shani, Arlo, Freya, Jeremy, Claire, Innis, Sal, Mary, Branny, Richard, Marg, Nat, Jess, Oliver, Gillian, David, Geoff and Andrew.

One of the electives at this year’s tree-planting fiesta was making plaster casts of animal tracks. Here we have a collection of fox tracks from the dam’s edge.

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Establishing an orchard: a dryland experiment

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in food, trees

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We’ve always been excited about fruit and nut trees. However, with our erosive, heavy clay soils we felt that the standard method of deep ripping for orchard preparation seemed inappropriate for our circumstances. Instead, with some research, we thought we’d experiment with a mounded method, building soil up on contour to catch rainwater while improving soil structure from the top down.

Wrestling the rotary hoe for the first till of the soil.

We began with constructing a shortlist of common species that are likely to be successful in our climate and soil type. Our intention is to construct a series of small-scale, experimental plantings around the farm before scaling up the most successful species and soil preparation methods. Continue reading →