Enjoy the read,
Elia

The Board of Project Platypus is thrilled to welcome a recently appointed Manager, Mark McLean! Mark is local to the Stawell area and for the least 20 years has been leading projects at Agriculture Victoria at their Horsham facility, while farming wool, lamb and cereals at home.

Since January, I have been busy behind the scenes working one day per week as a part time Communications Officer, in addition to my three days per week as the Local Landcare Facilitator. We now have a new Communications Plan, a design to overhaul our website (and we are excited to unveil the new site later in the year), and plans for increasing our engagement events & media coverage.  Stand-by for an exciting year of community engagement!

Congratulations to all our landcare groups who together submitted a whopping 16 Victorian Landcare Grants earlier this month!! That’s nearly double from last year – well done everyone!! Now we cross our fingers and wait. The results are usually announced in
In the meantime, visit our blog for a run down of what everyone applied for, and what might be in store for our region in the next year, including lots of habitat protection work, revegetation, and school collaborations!

This year we are teaming up with Jallukar Landcare Group to restore 16ha of land in the Grampians region. Come help us plant 7,000 native, endemic trees, shrubs and grasses, to create new habitat for our local wildlife. No experience necessary, just enthusiasm!

Project Platypus ran its first community plant out event in 2000, and it has been a beloved tradition ever since. Through these weekend events, hundreds of volunteers have planted over half a million trees across the Upper Wimmera. To all our returning volunteers – thank you for your continued dedication to our local environment! And to any new folks joining for the first time, thank you for helping carry on our tradition of coming together as a community and creating more and more habitat every year. We are so glad to have you on the team!

Find more details for the day and register at the Eventbrite page.

On the farm: Improving farm dams in the Northern Grampians

Northern Grampians Landcare has recently begun a process of identifying opportunities to improve farm dam and associated wetland management in a portion of the Northern Grampians Landcare Area between Mount William Creek and the Wimmera River (near Dadswell Bridge and Glenorchy).

Last year the group invited expert ecologist, Dr. Paul Foreman, to visit five properties in the Northern Grampians to assess the hydrology and habitat around farm dams. Dr. Foreman then created recommendation reports, identifying opportunities to improve habitat quality, water quality and drainage of farm dams and associated wetlands areas.

Earlier this month, Dr. Foreman came back up to share the results of his assessments. We visited four properties and together we laid out a plan to get started. Two of the landholders are taking the first steps, involving on-the-ground fencing and revegetation works. These properties will serve as test cases to showcase resources and options available for local farm dam improvement to the wider audience.

In our towns: Proposing to power our local communities with bioenergy

Moyston Landcare hosted a very interesting session on the potential for biofuels to support small town power needs, complementing intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. Daryl Sherger was our guest presenter. He has been working to progress the Ararat Renewable Energy Project.

Daryl pointed out that due to the peak output of solar panels being during summer, but peak community energy demand being in winter, even after investing in solar, our communities still rely considerably on coal to supply their winter energy needs. This is because, with current battery technology, it is cost prohibitive to store summer produced energy to use in the winter time. Daryl’s proposal is to invest in a local bioenergy system to provide that winter season energy, moving us off our reliance on coal and giving our town energy independence.

You can find out more, including Daryl’s description of the proposed project, at our blog. If you like what you read, Daryl notes that at the moment, he is a ‘committee of one’! As such if anyone is interested in helping to make this project happen, he would love you to get in touch.

We are back in orchid season! Local citizen scientists have been reporting several species in flower over the last two weeks, including:

• Tiny greenhood
• Blushing tiny greenhood
• Red banded greenhood
• Small mosquito orchid
• Bearded midge orchid

See all the recent records on our Upper Wimmera iNaturalist project.

Anthelid caterpillars also seem to be on the move this month, as I’ve had two friends in the last two weeks send me a photo of one for ID. Anthelids are some of the fluffiest caterpillars you’ll see around, and one of its members holds the honour of what I reckon is one of the best names in the caterpillar world: the “Hairy Mary!”

If you have photos of local landscapes/wildlife you’d love to share, you can e-mail them to me at llf@platypus.org.au or text me on 0414143456 and I will share them in the newsletter and the Project Platypus facebook page! And I am always keen to help identify a weird bug 🙂

We’ve been working at several sites across the region over the last two months, including:

• Kunzea in Halls Gap
• Rabbit Control in Ledcourt
• Woody weeds in Stawell
• Bridal Creeper in Concongella
• Bridal Creeper and rabbit control at the Stawell Pony Club
• Spiny rush in Gibblings Swamp and Moyston
• General weed control for offset Bush Blocks in Deep Lead and at the Parks Victoria Plantation Campground 
• Regular autumn weed control along Ararat and Northern Grampians Roadsides, Horsham Quarry and Western Quarries 

The RE ROSS kunzea project in Halls Gap has pretty much finished its third and final year. We have some shrubs to plant around town and that’s about it to finish it off. But this week we are getting started on the work associated with Halls Gap Landcare’s 2022 Vic Landcare Grant project.

Then the Landmate crew will focus on knapsack spraying watsonia and any other weeds that are up:

• along Grampians Rd south of Brambuk
• Reserve at the bottom of Silverspring Falls Rd
• North side of Mackey’s Peak Rd
• Cricket Clubrooms/Oval
• Creek behind YHA

Please let me know if you would like to share anything with your fellow landcarers in the PP region through this newsletter, such as events you’re group is running, great resources you have come across or developed, or exciting accomplishments from on your own plot of land!