Who ya gonna call? Weedbusters!

While the fence does a fabulous job keeping out mammalian predators, invasive plants are a bit trickier to contain. 

Our conservation team have been on the hunt recently for floral pests in previously unsearched areas of the sanctuary. As in previous seasons, the team devotes much of their time to known infestation sites, but also grid-searches areas that haven’t been checked recently to ensure no infestations are missed. There’s always a chance that a sneaky someone will manage to go unnoticed for a while!

Armed with a compass, weeding accoutrements, and endless enthusiasm for protecting the sanctuary against floral ferals, the team spread a few meters out from each other and slowly picked their way through thick vegetation, looking high and low for any wily woody species or cheeky climbers. This can be slow, painstaking work, but happily the team was rewarded not only with a lack of any new infestations, but also some cool native finds – including some large kaihua/NZ jasmine and puawānanga/Clematis paniculata and Clematis fosteri. 

Want to become a Weedbuster yourself? Check out https://www.weedbusters.org.nz/ for heaps of useful information on how to identify, control and dispose of weeds at your home.   

Hero image: Blackberry. Photo by Trevor James via weedbusters.org.nz