Volunteer Week 2024 – Celebrating NGT Volunteers

May 20th – 24th was National Volunteer Week. During the past couple on months we have been featuring some of our wonderful NGT volunteers in the newsletter. On the 24th of May we also held a morning tea at our Mt Gambier nursery to celebrate our volunteers. It was a lovely (and crisp) morning and luckily we had a fire pit to warm up.

So far in our recent newsletters we have heard the stories of:
Carole Ryan of the University of the Third Age, a gardener, child sponsor, passionate supporter of the conservation of nature and long-term NGT nursery volunteer, and
Deb Thompson, who has volunteered with NGT since 2018, and is a self confessed lover of rain (‘Pluviophile’).

This month we feature another two wonderful NGT nursery volunteers:
Lynn Gilbert, Founding member of Nelson Coastcare, native gardener, art-lover and dog-walker. Read Lynn’s story here, and
Suzy Meyers, A dog (and horse) lover and nature supporter. Read Suzy’s story here.

So what have our nursery volunteers been up to lately? Below some volunteers are using an interesting technique getting the seeds out of a Banksia marginata subspecies. It takes a bit of a firm hand to say the least!

Nursery coordinator Angela says: “Our local subspecies of Banksia marginata doesn’t need excessive heat to release the seed like other Banksias, we pick it when the seed starts to drop out, usually early autumn but with the dry summer we had this year they were a bit early, collected early/mid February. After a long summer of pricking out seedlings the volunteers are very pleased to do something a bit different. So they threw them about a bit, sorted the seed from the separators, then picked out a few with tweezers. We have planted some seed this week for planting out in winter 2025.”