It was good get-together this morning.
After working on cats claw and fruiting asparagus vine, we stopped for
morning tea and discussion. Kristie Jenkinson came along. She brought
along Darryl Kruger, who will be doing some of her work from next month,
to meet us. (Kristie is expecting a baby in September.)
Kristie has such a busy schedule that -
although she is the person in charge of volunteer groups, like ours,
which work with the Toowoomba Regional Council - we rarely get to see
her. It was particularly good to be able catch up, and to talk about our
concerns. Her best news is that it seems very likely
that Steve Plant will be working with us at our monthly working bees
again. That will be a worry off our minds!
Dawn Heath of Condamine Alliance, also came
to talk about joining the "Adopt-a-patch" programme. We had
a thorough discussion of what sort of help she would be able to give us, and the
decision was that we weren’t really keen on any of the original proposed
ideas (bird boxes, root blades, and toad netting). However, we
agreed that it would be helpful if Dawn could organise some more volunteers
to work with us. At present we think this will begin in spring,
probably on our regular working bee days. The project we thought we’d like help
with is getting the cats claw back to a manageable level, but they might
help with asparagus fern as well. The aim is to have just a small number of
adult volunteers - 3 to 6 people - who would work closely with our
members so we could get the weeds removed with minimal impact on other
vegetation. The programme would all be administered by Dawn, so there
would not need to be any
management of grant money by us.
Thanks very much to Gary Alcorn, who was
the one with the get up and go to put the thing in train.
Trish
