Germinating seeds.

I have had success with Spring and Autumn plantings. Autumn plantings are good but the plants have to wait a while for the chance to grow, spring plantings can take off very quick. I collect seed myself, things like eucalypts and wattles are quite easy, I haven't had to grow grass as we have lots of native grass here. My approach is to plant lots of things every year, sometimes they fail but sometimes the results are very rewarding, and the birds love it.

It's ok to water things to get them through their first few seasons. most natives will be fine once they get established.

Plant roots don't grow much in winter, the time of most root growth is spring followed by some root growth in Autumn. In summer the soil is too dry, in winter too cold. I don't sow seed direct, I sow seeds in pots and prick out into tubes. I don't see a problem with watering new plants through the summer if it isn't too hard to get water to them.

Apart from time, effort & cost the problem I have with watering is that SA is the driest state in the driest continent outside Antarctica so water is a hugely precious commodity here. Also, I note that water is becoming an enormous problem in Australia with increasing numbers of humans using it in increasingly profligate ways, not to mention the influence of climate change on droughts. Therefore, water conservation is a big issue for me.

On the root front, my understanding is that the roots of Australian natives, especially Eucalypts, generally grow fast & deep as soon as the seed germinates or the plant goes in the ground. I recall seeing a demonstration of this in a container with a glass side. The tap root growth was about 5 times the growth of the plant above ground. But I'm not sure at what time of the year the demonstration was conducted. Perhaps it was in spring. Whatever, I'm delighted with the low losses of my plantings when I plant after season's break (usually in autumn) & don't water in summer. Perhaps this approach is more applicable in SA's climate than elsewhere.

That makes sense to me, Tim. 

Great to hear that native plants are being bought &, hopefully, planted. (Years ago I gave two boxes of plants to an eagerly accepting neighbour & they sat, withered & died on his front verandah). Ah, well, at least the thought was there. 

I've wanted to leave a comment on this thread for a while now but am reluctant to speak my opinion about this topic. But I will say that germinating seeds is not something that happens successfully here in Tenterfield, even with exotic flowers. It seems the climate is all wrong, so I've had to change my strategy for germinating seeds. I now put seeds on a damp paper towel, throw it in a ziplock back and forget about them. This seems to work for me, and is how I'm able to germinate most of my seeds. If I plant seeds in pots or in the garden, all I get is a bunch of weeds germinating. 

Planting native plants to my area is not a problem when I can find said species but as I privately rent this place it makes me wonder how long the plants will survive before a new owner will rip all the plants out. I have a few native plants to my area that will outlive me and I refuse to plant them in the ground because at some point I know they will be ripped out by a new landlord. Knowing this frustrates the heck out of me. And to top all of that off, plants that struggle to survive in town (or are doing well at any stage of their growth) will eventually get removed for no obvious reason by vandals?/the council?.This just makes me so depressed. The attitude of people in this town toward plants in general that isn't grass needs to change. It's no wonder we rarely get any rain here with all this wide open area devoid of plant life. Just Google Earth "Tenterfield NSW" and you'll see what I mean. 

Landcare sucks here. They start out with projects then complete them but never look after any of the plants. Most to nearly all the plants they put in the ground do not survive. I feel like I'm the only person in this area that actually cares about the environment and wildlife.

My little garden with native plants in it will not make any difference at all. As depressing as it sounds, only a few older people will enjoy it's look, and a few individual birds may benefit from it when the plants are finally in flower. 

Yes, I know the person you are referring to Woko. That person, and it is a she, is actually me, Shirley Hardy. I quit this site because I had a fallout with Araminta. S*** happens, I guess.

Of all the plants I planted along the Tenterfield Creek only 2 have survived (both of which are trees). Everything else got whipper snippered down, eaten by rabbits or got killed by ants or just didn't make it, or got mowed down by the new neighbours. The new neighbours (the female anyway) is a horrible person and I've had a fallout with her too. Now there's cows, sheep and electric fences everywhere where and their garden has gone from a moist attractive garden to a really dry habitat that Tiger snakes now like. Their dog, which I like, kills all the snakes that he sees (and gets bitten by them except by the Tiger snakes). Many of the trees have been chopped down or mutilated. Most of the birdlife has disappeared that were there just 2 years ago because it's so dry there now. I've confronted the woman about the importance of planting plants by the creek to prevent erosion of their land and she flatly doesn't give a s*** about the erosion and doesn't believe a word I say. She refuses to plant anything along the creek to prevent erosion from happening. I've just given up on it all.

I'd actually plant native plants along the creek, as a phantom planter, by there's a stupid electric fence in my way. Owners of cows now allow their cows to graze right in the creek of the left side of the Douglas Street bridge, (where I was planting was on the right side of the Douglas Street bridge) right where there's still a small pocket of native vegetation left. Its not the cows fault. Anywhere I want to plant something there is going to be a human who finds my seedlings. I've even thought about putting a Strangler Fig up a poplar tree by the creek but the poplar trees have their lower branches tidied up each year by the council? each year. I'm getting that desperate for ideas right now.

It seems the property owners around here just want their nice lawn areas and wide open spaces to look at. Well, good for them because the climate is changing and their grass isn't green anymore. It's rarely green for long before it starts dieing off. And guess what? My front lawn is green and I don't water it. I'm siding with nature now. Let the place completely dry out for all I care. Humans have brought this upon themselves!

I recently was laughing my head off when I learnt about my neighbour's second dog. My neighbour had 2 dogs (the one I had the fallout with) and 2 cows. Well, the cows were borrowed (a mother cow and calf). One day the neighbours and their dogs were in the same paddock with the sheep and cows when suddenly the mother cow went mental, stampeded and attacked the little dog. It broke the dog's spine. Within the hour the little dog had to be euthanised by the vet, as she was paralalysed from the upper spine downward. Poor dog but serves the woman right for being a b***** and anti nature in the first place. Nature just doesn't like her. I've many stories like that one in reference to her in particular. 

Leaving things well alone is the best choice I've ever made. I know nature works it's own way to get back at people. I haven't lost a single plant in my garden except for most of my snow peas, in the last 24 months. I've found better things to plant than vegetables, although I still want to plant some. I'm still working on that though. I have celery and silverbeet in my garden, and they've survived the snow, frosts, drought, rain, heat, sudden changes in temperature, etc. Awesome! Can't say that about my stupid orchids though but they're battlers as adult plants. I love nature and will always love planting native plants and other things too. What's in the ground is more than what was there before.  I just have to think outside the box, and start thinking like nature does. A slow encroachment of plants from the outside inwards. That's how natural revegetation seems to happen. 

Thanks, Woko, I now know where I can plant some plants in secret that is never touched by humans at any time of the year and where no animals graze either. I'm going to attempt to plant upstream of the creek within walking distance of my place. I'll start a post about it when I have some pics to add. I needed this rant, so thanks again, Woko.

Woko, I tend to eventually reach a point of being completely exhausted of ideas and then give up on things. But then suddenly an idea will hit me like lightning as what happened in my last comment. I will probably never give up hope on revegetating my area but my previous strategies simply don't work. The effort and time I put into this revegetating project goes, for the most part, unrewarded. Nature seems to fight me all the way but nature encourages the plants that do survive from what I've planted. Only if the plants/trees cannot be ripped out by multiple floods will they survive. The 2 trees that survived have survived 5 floods now in the passed 3-3 1/2 years and the trees are now taller than 6 feet in height. 

The upstream area I have in mind is a small strip of roadside that never is attended to. The sides of the road are never mowed, and, natural revegetation is occurring along that strip albeit slowly. I've seen Crimson Rosellas eating from the revegetated Wattle trees along that strip in the past. There's lots of grass at maximum height there as well as rabbits. Not sure if it's native to the area or not though. The road leads to a gate to someone's property. The roadside leading down toward the gate can be easily planted out with native vegetation, even with gum trees without the seedlings being spotted until they're too big to be pulled out by hand. The idea is to hide the seedlings amongst the grass and let them grow as naturally as possible in that environment. Tree guards would just make it look obvious that revegetating is happening there by me. 

Which brings me to my next point.... people notice what people give attention to in this place. I recently found another but older specimen of an unidentified tree/shrub growing that I'd dug which had germinated by a bird dispersing the seed (it's not a weed that I can tell) so I took some photos of it. It was in an empty paddock near the road. Two days later the 6 foot specimen had vanished. The ground was undisturbed and no sign of it being cut down either that I could tell. It was growing amongst grass and there was another specimen growing further back in the paddock along the fence line. If this specimen was cut down by a human then there is no way I am letting anyone local see (or know about) my future activity of tree plantings nearby. I'll be working quietly with nature to get the trees/plants established. No tree guards, no spraying weeds/grass. It will look like they just grew there themselves. 

At the moment (today) I'm doing some research on what would be a good type of plant/s to plant upstream, that not only the seeds will self germinate downstream but the birds will also relocate them elsewhere. I need multiply options for the maximum seed dispersal, and something that self germinates quickly; like the way a weed self germinates but something native to my area. 

For the past few years Tiger snakes started heading south more and last October they began popping up in people's backyards here in town. Tiger snakes have made a nest underneath my anti-environmental neighbour's old car shed in a rabbit warren, so I'm laughing my head off about that one. The Tiger snakes don't cross the road at all so I never see them at my place. I do see Red-bellied snakes (juveniles) and the odd Brown snake on our lawn. I think they're escaping from the neighbours across the road, and their snake killing dog and the livestock in their paddock.

My neighbours across the road are freaking out when it comes to the snakes as there was an Inland Taipan under their house for a few weeks last summer. It then moved on quickly. There was also a very large snake that travelled through the creek heading downstream - something really big and something like a python. The neighbour's noticed the snake trail and called out the Dept. of Wildlife here in town. Nature turns on people in all kinds of ways. I'm laughing because the more snakes that are killed in the area the more that relocate themselves to this area in the same season. 

It seems you're working out a few ideas for yourself, Hyperbirds. That's great. You're the one on the scene so your ideas are more likely to bear fruit (& seed) than ideas from outside (such as mine). It'll be interesting to see how they work out. Good luck & may conditions be fair to you & your plantings!

Thanks spiney and Woko for your encouragement. I've discovered there are plant species that have gone extinct in my area (Tenterfield plateau), and some are very close to being extinct. I found this website that records living specimens of flora in Australia and I'm using that site as a source of reference to ID native flora to my area. Here's the link to that site:

http://bie.ala.org.au/species/urn:lsid:biodiversity.org.au:apni.taxon:113524

No matter where you live in Australia there'll be records on that site for your area. It's useful to everyone. It's made me realise one thing, timber trees were chopped down in the Northern Tablelands until all the trees were basically extinct. I always wondered why there are only Eucalypt, Wattles and the odd Banksia trees in the area. I always wondered why flora diversity is lacking in this area. Now I know why: You take down the biggest trees and the other plants suffer and die, if they're not cut down or bulldozed too. Its a sad, sad tale and depressing to think about all the plant life lost and went extinct in the process just for the need for timber.

I think offering free tree seedlings to people in the area is a good way to go for me. It will get more trees planted and people love free plants. Even I get excited about free seedlings. Just the other day I was at my local nursery (Thrifty Link Hardware store - it's the only place in town where the plants actually survive when I plant them in the ground) and I asked if they had any seedlings of the Camellias that were growing in their nursery wild. I just loved seeing those deep rich pink flowers that the Eastern Spinebills ate from too. They didn't have any seedlings but said I could take some cuttings of it for free. We ended up finding a lot of seedlings popping up and, well, I ended up bringing 7 of the seedlings home and it cost me nothing. I dug them up myself. On Monday I'm going back to get more because I have a home for 6 of the seedlings already and one is going into my garden. I don't care if its an exotic from Japan, it's a plant, and my garden lacks plants. The whole area lacks plants. I hate grass, and the camellia will at least kill off the grass in the area where it will grow. If nothing else camellias produce nectar and drop their flowers and petals and leaves. The camellia will add to the non existance of autumn leaves in my garden - I have to start somewhere to introduce decidious trees. The camellia is that starting point for me. 

I'm not worried about an invasive outbreak of camellias all over town as it isn't happening with that species. Revegetation naturally doesn't happen much, if rarely, in town anyway, except for small pockets of it and it is a very slow process even in the creek itself.

Edit: The local aboriginal name for Tenterfield is "Moombillen" which means "Place of Wild Honey", however, all the plants that are known to produce that type of nectar for the wild bees are gone and basically so are the wild bees too.

I hear ya, Woko. Sometimes I wonder what the heck I am doing planting exotic plants in my garden. The exotics I have planted though are not invasive which you'll be happy about. I'd happily kill an invasive exotic if I learn it is invasive and I bought it unawares of that fact. Sometimes, like in my case, finding indigenous species is really, really hard if not impossible locally. In my case I've resorted to shopping online for indigenous plants. The plants I really want I just can't find or are too expensive for me to buy. I'm now resorting to buying seeds of indigenous plants as I've exhausted my seedling options for plants to grow. I want a semi subtropical rainforest look about my garden and need specific indigenous plants for that look. Can't buy them here so have to look elsewhere. The seeds I planted which are supposed to be annual flowers look suspiciously like weeds to me so I'm going to be ripping them out very soon - all of them - and starting again with something else. Darned weeds!

Yes, Woko, they would survive in Tenterfield's winters. It's not the winter they'd have to survive but the autumn, spring and summer. Just with a little bit of planning and thinking about how to block the strong southerly and westerly winds, how to keep the ground cool all year round, and try and get some sort of canopy happening, the rest is actually easy and doable.

Here's a heads up on Tenterfield's climate for ya. Tenterfield is classified as a subtropical highland climate with an altitude of 845 metres above sea level. I haven't been in Tenterfield long enough to state that the climate here goes in cycles. But I can say I've been here since October 1995 and the weather seems to be resorting back to a "rainy" climate again, which last ended in 2001. 

The seasons are like this in the "rainy cycle": Summer: major low level thunderstorms and torrential downpours, cool weather. Ground level clouds roll in and it rains at ground level. No floods occur during this rainy cycle. Autumn: cold and windy with regular rain; frosts; fogs and more rain but it is lighter rain than the summer rain. Winter: cold but a little bit warmer. It still rains though regularly. Around mid July it snows for just one day out of the whole year. Spring: Frosts, fogs and more rain merging back into low level thunderstorms. It rains so frequently in the rainy cycle you can actually set your watch to it. Light intensity levels are low.

During the "dry cycle" it goes like this: Summer - very little rain but most of the rain is from harsh thunderstorms and freaky weather fronts.  Floods are common nearly every summer. Formations of tornados in their beginning phases pass over Tenterfield. Summer is increasingly getting hotter for longer but it will only be for about a month of really hot weather. It then begins to cool down late summer. Autumn: usually dry, warmish, heavy frosts and fogs. Winter: some rain might happen if we're lucky, snow might happen if we're lucky; usually warmer to hotish weather. Around late August to early September it starts getting hotter then gets colder then gets hotter again before summer really kicks in. Spring: thunderstorms usually go around us; can be cold or hot weather. The weather can change at the drop of the hat. It might rain and sometimes it does. The weather is unpredictable. From autumn to late winter the nights are cold (usually to minus 10 degrees celcius) until it starts warming up again around spring. Light intensity levels are high.

Planting subtropical species can work here if all the weather conditions are taken into consideration over a long period of time. The plants have to adapt to it all whether they're delicate species or not. The thing is, Woko, seedlings can survive and adapt to my climate really well if they are not tiny in size. I prefer to keep small seedlings in their containers for longer than normal until I see some plant growth on them, then I put them in the ground. That works out better for the plants as they establish quicker.

Subtropical plants wouldn't cost me lots in water and effort in summer than any other species would. It's simply a matter of keeping the ground cooler than normal by adding more organic matter, plus the occassional watering. I also plant my seedlings deeper than normal and so far my seedlings have not complained or died from it - even my callistemons and wattle tree. 

Ground temperatures can reach to above 50 degrees in summer. That can also happen in spring too so keeping the ground cool, even in winter, is my top priority as it helps the plants survive the frosts and the heat.

Actually, Woko, from what I've read about subtropical rainforests the plants are usually drought tolerant for the most part as they don't get a great deal of rainfall like tropical rainforests do.  I guess growing up in the South Australian climate has given me the upper hand.

Does anyone have another method to germinate wattle seeds when the normal soaking of the seed doesn't work? 

I've had excellent results by bringing a saucepan of water to the boil, waiting a few seconds for the boiling to stop then dumping the Acacia seeds in. The next morning shoots have appeared & the germinating seeds are ready to plant.