The blog has been quiet this month, partly because I was in Cape Town for a week to present a seminar, but also because the two weeks prior to that I was busy all day with a chainsaw. The task was to deal with the invasive Australian Acacia species clogging up our stream. Thankfully, the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry allocated money through the Working for Water program so that we could basically employ 10 people for 10 days in order to cut down, cut up, and stack branches of all the wattle in our stream. The wattle sucks up the water and shades out all native vegetation, so very bad for biodiversity. The Working for Water program means we get help clearing the aliens, and local people get work. Win-win.
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| An aerial view of the wattle forest from a nearby hill. Clearing already underway in the left section. |
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| Before (kindof, some tree already went before I thought about taking some photos) |
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| After. We can see the stream again! Yay! |
We will have to conduct several follow up operations in order to clear the seed bank. In the meantime, we have lots of seedling indigenous trees in bags which we will eventually plant out to recreate some natural forest.
I should mention the young trees we planted were all frosted in the first winter - its just too cold for forest here.
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