Kiama Council is encouraging everyone to celebrate National Tree Day this Sunday, 1 August.
Council is a proud participant in National Tree Day, which has seen more than 25 million trees planted since it began in 1996.
While COVID restrictions have prevented our traditional public planting events, such as with local schools, this year, our bush regenerators have still been busy, planting out at sites across our municipality to mark the occasion.
This week they have been planting further trees at the Spring Creek Wetlands near Bombo Cemetery, and will be doing more planting at Hyams Creek in Jamberoo next week.
Our team has planted approximately 200 local rainforest species at Spring Creek, to complement the Bangalay Sand Forest vegetation community plantings done in the last 2 years.
Hyams Creek will receive another 200 plants next week, from rainforest vegetation community, adding to the initial plantings done when we removed the coral tree and privet earlier in the year.
The work at Hyams Creek is to restore the riparian corridor through Jamberoo.
Hyams Creek has been eroded by livestock and choked by large coral trees and other woody weeds.
We have already removed the coral trees, lantana and other weeds, and are planting endemic native species such as river she oak, forest red gum, lilly pilly, red ash, grey myrtle and sandpaper fig.
This will improve the water quality of Hyams Creek with flow on benefits to the Minnamurra River estuary.
Our crews have also been busy working with the local Landcare group at Bombo Headland in recent years, removing weeds such as lantana and planting out native trees.
This year we will working with this group to plant a further 300 trees, the large nature of the planting will make weed control easier. We will also be preparing future planting sites.
A further site at Seven Mile Beach will also be planted out later this year by the local Landcare group.
As well as contributing to the aims of National Tree Day, these plantings will also play in a part in our target of being carbon neutral by 2031.
Our new Corporate Emissions Reduction Plan (2021-2031) includes the strategy of initiating emissions reduction projects within our municipality and surrender the carbon units produced to create offsets.
Council's efforts have been strongly supported by Landcare Illawarra, which supplies trees grown by local producers.
