Taking stock

It was cold – winter is when weed growth slows down and its time for the beanie – so in June 2021 the group decided to do a stocktake of our weeding site.

We walked the main roads through our site: the first part of the gravel road along Narrow Neck Peninsular, which is called Glenraphael Drive, and Cliff Drive to Narrow Neck Lookout. Up until this time we had just focused our weeding efforts on the known worst locations and had not had a good look for other weed infestations across the whole site. Karen our trusty supervisor recorded significant features and weed infestations on her clipboard.

Karen logs weeds along Cliff Drive which were treated at the same time.
Karen logs weed locations along Cliff Drive and if the infestation was small enough Paul and the rest of the team immediately treated them.

We used a smart phone to record the location of points and to confirm the location of Glenraphael Road. Andrew uses Pocket Earth Pro, an easy to use map app for iPhones. You can see the start of the route walked by the blue line.

Map of Bushcare and Glenraphael Drive site using Pocket Earth Pro.
Map of the bushcare site made using Pocket Earth Pro, an iPhone app. The blue line is the logged route of Glenraphael Drive. The dashed red line is the operational area of the Narrow Neck Bushcare group. The area to the west is part of Blue Mountains National Park.

The collected point and line data is then passed onto the Council’s GIS team.

Data collection didn’t take all morning, so while we were at Cliff Drive near Narrow Neck Lookout we got to work with those weeds that were in sight.

Judy and Pip attack a small New Zealand flax nestled in the bracken ferns near Cliff Drive.

Paul and Andrew found a large New Zealand flax plant (Phormium tenax) on the fuel reduced zone on council land close to Cliff Drive. It is invasive in forests and woodlands, so worth removing before spreading into the nearby intact bushland.

Paul is about to launch an attack.
Victory! Paul and Andrew make sure the New Zealand flax is gone after about 10 minutes’ work.

It is immensely satisfying to remove such a large weed in a short amount of time.

The glyphosate treated base of the New Zealand flax worked on by Paul and Andrew in the photos above. The red areas are the stems where glyphosate was applied, the red dying making it easier to see which areas you have treated.
After his head and shoulders were buried in the New Zealand flax, Andrew found a huntsman spider on his shoulder.

Just after this June session, the Narrow Neck Bushcare group went into hibernation as the whole of Greater Sydney was put into COVID lockdown for three and a half months. We are itching to get back into the bush and see what weeds have popped up and how much those weeds we haven’t got to yet have grown.

This is a long-game and we can wait until we are ready because the weeds are not going anywhere – well at least if they are not seeding!