From the April Paparoa Press
The volunteers of Otamatea HarbourCare Society are looking forward to planting season as the weather cools, and plants in the Station Road nursery managed by Mark MacKenzie grow ever larger.
OHS grows around 20,000 plants each year from locally sourced seed, which are sold to farmers and lifestyle block owners in the area of the old Otamatea County Council. This year plant number are down slightly, following a failure of cabbage tree seeds to germinate, but nearly 10,000 manuaka, 5,000 flax, and 3,000 sedge will be heading for new homes from May. The nursery also has smaller numbers of kahikatea, karaka, karo, tītoki and a few other species.
The Society sells most of its stock via the Kaipara Moana Remediation scheme, which primarily assists landowners with more than 20 hectares of land to develop sediment reduction projects that improve water quality in the harbour. But don’t despair if you have a smaller block – plants are available for planting alongside waterways or erosion-prone land in the Kaipara Harbour catchment, (although not to satisfy a resource consent condition).
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