Join us as we work towards creating a thriving native habitat in our creek.
The plan with this project is to create a healthy native wetland that provides a habitat for a variety of fish, amphibians, insects and birds.
Our Kalamunda property is a battle axe block, with a long driveway that takes you down into the valley. It has a permanent creek that runs through the front of the property. The driveway has a road bridge that passes over the creek, and there is another foot bridge that crosses the creek to a small grassy area on the other side.
During the rainy season, the creek is inundated with water runoff from the road. This has created several problems. During heavy rain, the large volume of water creates erosion issues along the banks of the creek. In addition, especially during the first rains after a long dry spell, oil and debris gets washed into the creek, polluting the water.
Our goals are to stabilise the creek banks to prevent further erosion, and repopulate the creek and surrounding area with a variety of native plantings to try and reduce the impact of the water pollution, and provide habitats for native wetland creatures.
I will be sharing regular posts with photographs and information about the work we are doing, and I hope you will find them interesting and informative!
We are heading towards the tail end of winter now. I haven't done much work over the last couple of months, just monitoring how the repairs are faring during the winter rains. Luckily we haven't had any major deluges, and it appears the sandbagging works have held up beautifully. One area I have been working is in the garden bed along the fence down by the creek, which was completely overgrown. Here are some pictures :)
The beginning of July and we have finally had some decent rain. The creek is flowing more briskly, but all our sandbagging and repairs have held up quite well. Most of the plants we have put in have established themselves quite nicely. I won't do much more planting now until the heavy rains have passed, likely leading into early/mid spring.
It has been a pretty dry Autumn so far, so the water level in the creek is particularly low. We have been regularly watering the plants that I am trying to establish higher up on the banks, hopefully in the next couple of weeks we will get enough rain so that they will be fine without the extra attention.
This weekend our goal was to place more rocks and sandbags around the pipe head, particularly on the house side. On inspection last week we found that there was significant erosion around the top of the pipe under the road bridge, which could potentially cause sinking or even collapse of the driveway. I also wanted to try and get some more native seedlings in on the creek banks, particularly in the muddy areas further down where there is minimal vegetation.
As the rainy season is fast approaching, we are working on the higher banks around the pipe head, because anything we plant at the waters edge will likely be washed away during winter. Water plantings will have to wait until spring, so they have a full season to get root systems established before the annual flooding. Ma and I took a trip down to the local native nursery to stock up.
Priority number 1: To stabilise the banks around the pipe head under the road bridge, before the heavy winter rains.
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