2025 has been a great year for on-ground working bee’s which, thanks to our Glossy Black Cockatoo planting project resulted in 60 volunteers (approximately 240 volunteer hours) across 6 planting events! Brilliant stuff, but that wasn’t enough for you apparently and we’ve been asked to provide MORE working bee’s which is totally amazing. So, we put on one last event for the year and that was at Will’s farm in Cudal – partly to thank Will for his work in looking after our tube-stock in between plantings but also because his place is just so beautiful & worthy of a helping hand.

Will runs a sheep agistment enterprise on part of his 274 hectare farm Lowanna with the rest comprising of paddocks, corridoors and other biodiversity plantings. Will & his wife Sue who sadly passed away last year, have been on a tree-growing mission since moving to the property in 2002, so much so that Will’s lost count of just how many have been planted and you can tell – the whole place is just beautiful.

Today our team of willing workers turned up to help Will straighten up some old tree guards that were still required while removing and collecting guards that had served their purpose & weeding around the edges. Before doing that we took a look at Will’s substantial veggie garden and got a tour of his growing native plant nursery – a labour of love and necessity – reducing both the costs and stock availability issues that can occur in large-scale revegetation initiatives like the one Will has taken on.

Our team of 10 made light work of the tree guard’s before downing tools and walking up to the farm’s high point where we could really appreciate the beauty that brought Will & Sue here. Sue wasn’t left behind, we paid our respects to her as we passed where her ashes were scattered and thanked her for leaving such a beautiful green-thumbed mark on this lucky piece of the world.

N.B: When we arrived, we were introduced to the resident Boobook owl (See slide show). This is what the owl would sound like should they call.

We’re always happy to have more volunteers on board for our Working Bee & project planting events so if this looks like something you’d like to participate in, do drop us an email or give us a call. We publish coming events in our monthly newsletter which is free to sign up to and also contains details of grants you can apply for plus other events in our region that we feel may be of interest.