The weedy season

20 January 2021

I'm down in my bit of Sandy Creek, doing what has to be done with the summer weeds.

I've been able to avoid it till January, because of the wet weather. With all that dampness, and coolness, the thistles are late to flower, and I've put it off and put it off, until .... oh bugger it, if I don't get those thistles before they seed, I'll lose the ground I've been gaining on them over the last few years.

So here I am with my mattock, to lift out the thistle roots with the narrow end, and secateurs and chicken feed bag to stash the thistle heads that are too far advanced to risk leaving them in the open air. The carcasses I stack to be hauled away to the burning pile. 

There's blackberry too, growing briskly after all that rain, gorse of course, re-sprouting, and something I haven't noticed before that looks decidedly non-native, a kissing cousin I'm sure to the water-loving weed I've been targeting around the house this summer. Some serious attention from the mattock and I've cleaned out two clumps.

There are fewer weeds than last year, and fewer than five years ago. Dean Platt, the ecologist who first inspected my place and put me into the Melbourne Water Stream Frontage program, said at the time: 

"We just have to tip the balance in favour of the natives, and they will take over the territory."

The first three years of spaying changed a creek covered in blackberry to this sunlight gully of bracken and the sweet bursaria in bloom now on the northern side of the creek. 

All the creek asks of me now is this annual sweep to discourage the bad guys. 

Then it stays here, from summer into winter and rolling back to summer, living out its life. Any season and any time of the day, I can walk down to another world.

Ross Colliver
Riddells Creek Landcare