THE Hamilton Field Naturalists Club (HFNC) was very grateful for the efforts of 10 Baimbridge College Year 9 students and their teacher, Ross Hopkins for their voluntary work over six weeks to remove the weedy Acacia paradoxa seedlings and small shrubs from the Wannon Flora Reserve. 

HFNC also wished to thank Rhett Beattie as the organiser of the program. 

The students arrived each Wednesday morning and worked for an hour from 9:30am to 10:30am as part of their activities program for Term 2. 

They were building on the work of their fellow students who did the same sort of work in the Reserve last year with the work consisting mainly of hand-pulling seedlings and lopping larger bushes.

The aim for this year’s weed removal was to continue the work of recent years to progressively remove this weedy shrub from the Reserve to allow the other less robust native plants to grow and to support the great diversity of animals that can live there. 

HFNC members will follow up on the students’ work in the coming weeks by removing some of the larger shrubs that require chainsaw work and continue with the lopping and hand-pulling of smaller plants.

The good thing about these plants was that if the larger shrubs are cut below the leaf area of the plants then they do not reshoot. 

The benefit of applying these methods of control has meant that people do not have to use herbicide to remove these plants – thereby protecting the workers as they work and protecting other native plants from any accidental spillage/contamination or spray drift of herbicide.

Already, after a few years of weed-removal, HFNC has observed the previously shaded areas supporting a greater variety of plants that were initially seen and photographed in Reserve from the 1960s to the early 2000s, but which were later covered by the Acacia shrubs.