OLG's Bushy Point Planting Day 2026
The 2026 Planting Day was successfully completed on Sunday 4th October. After weeks of rain the day was hot, sunny, blue sky and windless, also a change from recent years! A group of around 35 people assembled at 10am and we were finished by 1pm. The plants – the usual collection of wind and frost tolerant “first planter species” (such as cabbage trees, Pittosporums, Coprosmas, broadleaf) were collected from the Southland Community Nursery on a very wet Friday morning, put onto trailers by Nursery volunteers and a group placed all the plants on-site on Friday afternoon when it had stopped raining so hard!
Barry Smith and Brian Rance oversee the whole operation and the ground had been prepared earlier with herbicide and combi-guards were on hand to protect the new plants from rabbits and enable spray releasing to be done later. With the scale of the Bushy Point planting project, spraying is a necessary evil, but hand weeding of many other areas is always a popular activity in summer and if you can help with that contact the [Enable JavaScript to view protected content]
The plants this year were funded by Trees that Count which funded the main plantings 500 trees, OLG have funded a further 200 red tussocks which were also planted on the day and 100 tall long lived in-fill plants such as kahikatea, pokaka, totara, matai and rata have been funded by OLG to be planted by other groups such as schools this year.
After planting, people walked either through Bushy Point back to Rances Education Centre for a bbq or collected their cars and drove round to Grant Road. Ray and Nicky were waiting with bbq delights and drinks – very welcome. Thanks to Dani from DOC for organising the bbq food.
Thanks to Barry for the bulk of the organising, OLG Committee members and all the volunteers from the Nursery and OLG for another successful planting day. Barry will have exact stats on just how many plants we have put into the ground at Bushy Point but it will now be over 38,000 plants!
Thanks to Chris Rance for this report.
Posted on: Monday, 5 October 2026
