Category Archives: trees

The Fourth Annual Tree Planting Extravaganza!

20 Monday Jun 2016

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

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Reforesting the Fleurieu, one tree(guard) at a time.

Over the June long weekend, once again our loyal crew of tree-planters descended on Yarnauwi for the fourth year of tree planting. This year we planted 600 plants, local species associated with pink and red gum woodlands.

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The 2016 Crew

After 3 years of planting, many patches of seedlings are now well established, and on rainfall only they’re slowly growing into the landscape. Our mission for this year was to fill in some unplanted spaces, trace windbreaks and corridors between islands of vegetation, replant tricky spots with specially selected vegetation and to expand some of our successful woodlots. Spots that we cleared junk from earlier in the year were planted out, and areas of erosion control will also be planted with sedges and reeds this season. Continue reading →

Winter active

31 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by in diy, ecology, regeneration, trees

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Blue gum (Eucalyptus leucoxylon) seedlings ready for planting.

Before Yarnauwi, we never really appreciated winter. Now, through the long dry season, we find ourselves yearning for a chill edge to the wind, the moisture in the grass, and skies of dark clouds. We’ve tried to plan our year to mimic the lives of so many of the organisms that occupy our landscape: in the hot, dry times, we go into maintenance mode, watching and waiting for the first rains before we spring into action again. With the greening of the landscape, it’s all on: tree-planting has begun, shed sites are levelled, the grass grows. In winter, the kangaroos converge in clans numbering hundreds, displaced from the pasture, they lounge among the seedlings in the reveg areas while we look on nervously.

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Joel and Annika work on a rock dam to arrest erosion on a boundary before the rains hit.

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And then the rains hit.

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The Yarnauwi Farm Annual Report 2015

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by in diy, events, livestock, planning, regeneration, trees

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You can view a printable version of this Annual Report here.

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We’re now three years into the Yarnauwi project. With all of our major water and fencing infrastructure in place, 2015 was a year of consolidating and refining our planting and grazing systems, and continuing to restore habitat while also developing income streams. Once again, we thank you for your support this year, whether that’s been planting trees, purchasing meat, hauling junk, offering advice or just being generally encouraging! We feel enormously privileged to have such a supportive community of family, friends and neighbours contributing to the restoration and development of this patch of ground. Continue reading →

The time of plans and projects

23 Monday Nov 2015

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

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Grain fields at Aldinga, and drying hills

It seems like summer comes sooner and sooner. Winter was short, and so dry that the dam never progressed beyond a puddle, then the sun was back, the grass grew for a moment then was baked dry again by an early heatwave. The northern faces of the hills turned a bleached gold, then quickly the green haze on the south sides followed. And we’re back, heading into the hot season again, settling into a holding pattern of heat and dormancy until the opening rains.

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North faces baked dry in the first heat

Tolstoy apparently called spring “the time of plans and projects”. Now a year into our sheep project, we’ve begun tweaking our grazing practices in an effort to manage our pasture more effectively. We’ve increased our flock size through both breeding and the acquisition of some hardy, desert-adapted damara sheep, brought in from a dusty paddock outside Nuriootpa to replace the ageing and increasingly delicate Wiltshire Horn matriarchs. The existing flock hasn’t exactly embraced the new arrivals, there’s plenty of bleating and foot-stomping. You could cut the tension with a knife when we pour out the sheep nuts. Among the damaras is Manchego, our new ram. Looking at Pecorino’s legacy, it’s clear he has big hooves to fill.

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Book review: Going ‘Feral’ with George Monbiot

05 Thursday Nov 2015

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

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17160008Our experience and vision for Yarnauwi has always sat in a tension between the wild and the cultivated. On one hand, we’re seeking to restore habitat long altered, while on the other, we’re determined to cultivate food, through both livestock and horticulture. It’s hard to say if one holds priority over the other, and, at risk of lurching into cliche, we try to ‘listen to the land’. Connor Stedman’s Essay on Soil in the 2015 Greenhorns’ New Farmer’s Almanac offers ideas that resonated with us, writing that to know how to be a steward of a landscape, “…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 with the planted field” (2015, p. 35).

Stedman’s assertions provide a concise summary of our motivations for obsessing over the past ecological history of our particular patch, and theorising about the patterns that might’ve governed the landscape before colonisation. Fixated as we are on what was here before, there’s much to delight in in George Monbiot’s Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life (Penguin, 2013). In it, Monbiot confronts what he describes as ‘ecological boredom’ brought about by the absence of the wild, and asserts the need to ‘rewild’ our landscapes. His vision of rewilding is not one of meticulous restoration of past habitats, but rather letting landscapes return to their own ecological stability. Continue reading →

New linocut print: Fear the deer!

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in art & craft, diy, ecology, regeneration, trees

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“Fear the deer, rue the roo, but keep on planting!”, linocut inspired by efforts to revegetate the southwestern Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia, by Joel Catchlove

After months of chipping away at this latest linocut in spare moments sprinkled throughout family life, I’m pleased to announce it finished! “Fear the deer, etc.” was begun earlier this year in the lead-up to the 2015 tree planting season and depicts the view looking west from Yarnauwi, with a selection of local birds eagerly awaiting the maturation of our and our neighbours’ revegetation efforts! In the meantime, they perch in the antlers of a red deer skull, one of the many voracious herbivores in the neighbourhood that present challenges for raising seedlings.

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The carved block, ready for inking

The birds shown are, on the left, a tawny frogmouth, a family of which we’ve spotted 500 or so metres from our back boundary, but our property still lacks the habitat to tempt them closer, a black-faced cuckoo-shrike (aka. shufflewing, due to its habit of shuffling its wings upon landing), common in nearby woodland but still only a passing visitor to Yarnauwi, and the Australasian Pipit, an enthusiastic resident of the farm.

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Ready for inking.

Special thanks to Jess S, patron of the arts, for donating part of her stash of lino for the creation of this particular piece! Thanks again to our community of friends and neighbours who continue to contribute to the broader effort of restoring habitat on our property and beyond!

Seeing the forest for the trees: piecing together past ecology

21 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in ecology, planning, regeneration, trees

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Tall stringybark forest, Deep Creek Conservation Park, southwestern Fleurieu Peninsula.

It’s a preoccupation of ours to develop our understanding of the historic ecology of the farm. We’ve pored over books such as Mangroves to Mallee (Berkinshaw 2009), and The Native Forest and Woodland Vegetation of South Australia (Boomsma & Lewis), but their listings of different plant associations were often bewildering as we tried to nut out which was the best fit for our patch of ground. We had some information about climate, and a basic knowledge of soils, but only limited local remnant vegetation to refer to for an idea of what might’ve been here before colonisation. Our property has a couple of old red gums, but little sense of what the landscape might have looked like two hundred years ago. Early advice we received suggested that our landscape was once “pink gum woodland”, yet most of the initial pink gums we planted died. Having a sense of how our landscape was in the past not only assists our success in habitat regeneration, but also offers insight into how our landscape works in general.

We’ve looked at historical photographs, and they seemed to confirm our sense that there were once more trees than there are now, but by the late 1800s they already depict a deforested landscape. Through early colonial accounts we’ve also pieced together a rough picture of what the landscape may have been like, with a particular focus on how water may have been managed in the vegetation and soil. We’ve even brainstormed a sequence of events for how the landscape may have changed between colonisation and now, but what we lacked was local ecological detail. It was time to go back to the library, this time to trawl through past ecological studies of the region. With many written in the early 20th century, the papers we found articulate connections between soils, rainfall and then-living memory of plant communities throughout the Mount Lofty Ranges.

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Vegetation Map of the Mount Lofty Ranges and Murraylands, from Specht 1972

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The “wild zone” blooms…

14 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in ecology, regeneration, trees

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ParadoxaBlossonWe recently celebrated the appearance of our first blossoms on the wattles planted in our revegetation area. At almost three years old, this Acacia paradoxa has offered a few tentative blooms and while it’s a modest showing, we’re absurdly excited about it. It marks a shift in our ‘wilderness’ zones, from plants that we’ve cultivated and maintained towards plants that have survived through dry years and the appetites of kangaroos, to become plants that are beginning to thrive and reproduce independently.

Planting for the future: exploring tree time

30 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in ecology, propagation, regeneration, trees

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Present-day badlands, future cloud forest (?!): Sophie and Annika take a break from planting.

After three months, our tree planting activities are finally finished for 2015. The pattern is always the same. Sophie does her best to moderate my impulses, but when the opening rains come I always seem to get a rush of chlorophyll to the head and end up with boxes of seedlings more than we could ever reasonably plant. That said, with the support of our community of family and friends, this year we planted 1000-odd trees, shrubs and ground covers, 300 grasses propagated from seed collected on the property, and still had a few boxes to give to neighbours.

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Asher inspects a red gum seedling only a few months younger than him.

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From badlands to woodlands: The Third Annual Tree Planting Extravaganza

15 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in ecology, propagation, regeneration, trees

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The day one team, still smiling after 350 holes

In early June we hosted our third annual tree-planting fiesta. Through the generosity of our friends and family, we planted another 800-odd trees, forming shelterbelts and habitat corridors along the southern and western boundaries. As in previous years, the trees are mostly local provenance with some propagated through Trees for Life, and others from seed we’ve gathered. This year, we’re also experimenting with enhancing seedling resilience by inoculating them with beneficial fungi and mulching each planting, in addition to protection with roo-thwarting tree guards.

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Jumping into the mulch pile

We hope the annual planting is becoming a tradition. Despite the aching muscles and brisk breezes, there’s great pleasure in working among friends beneath a big sky. For the brood of kids, there are gullies and mallow thicket cubbies to spend days leaping into. There is great pleasure too in the sense that this future, hoped-for woodland is an enduring legacy of the companionship and generosity of our community. Continue reading →