Welcome new residents and planting update

We are excited to announce five new Randalls Bay residents! Our beloved swans have hatched this year’s family of cygnets.  

In planting updates, the rain is very welcome and they are thriving and growing really well. We have just finished fertilising the two previous years plantings so the rain has just come at the right time. There are lots of little volunteer plants coming through the mulched areas and from experience they often do better than the nursery reared ones. We will see how they go.

We have put in a large order with NRM at the Huon Council for next year’s plantings. So there will be plenty to do in the planting season next year.

There was a lot of wind damage in our area and we have taken some broken branches to Mickeys (upper) for a sort of mulch around the latest plantings. There is still a lot of area to plant and the tree limbs will stop the dirt drying out too much while we wait for more plants. It will also provide shelter and habitat for insects and small creatures. It looks a bit untidy but only in the short term. 

Randalls Beach has taken a battering from unexpectedly high tides which has impacted on the plantings at the edge of the dunes, especially the carpobrotus (pig face). Some of it may survive but we’ll have another crack at planting more – we will wait and see if the high tides are the new normal first. There are still plenty of degraded banks along the dunes at Randalls that would benefit from some filling in – when it gets going, pig face is such a great asset to contain the sand. It also stops the dogs running on the vulnerable sand banks.

Interestingly, the little poas we planted didn’t seem to suffer from salt water inundation. We have asked the Huon council folk if they have any more poas – they can grow them quite quickly and we may be able to get some sooner, rather than later.

Mickeys Beach also lost a lot of sand some of which has come back but the southern end has been scoured out and we have lost some of our pig face and tetragonia – both plants are great at holding the dunes together. We will persevere.