The Spanish Heath Menace

Tuesday 3 August
Kalang site

Patches of Spanish Heath and Broom had been discovered beside some of the informal tracks near Barossa Creek. When arriving at the main Spanish Heath spot it was in flower, and this showed that it was more widespread within grass and sags than originally thought. This made for slow work and to take a break we moved to a couple of discreet locations that could be fully dealt with.

The Broom locations were checked and surprisingly there didn’t seem to be any, but on a second look one was spotted. It was chewed low and only had a few miserable leaves, but then we started noticing a lot more. It seems that the wallaby and other browsers liked the Broom and had eaten nearly all they could find, but not touched the Pultenea daphnoides growing in the same locality. We pulled out all that could be seen and also dug out Agapanthus roots, on which there were no leaves and it had obviously been dumped there many years ago but wasn’t dead.


See this site for a location of the Barossa Creek weeds.


The white Erica flowers can be seen in the grass and sags.  David and Greg clearing.



Yellow fungus   photo Chris Woods

Clearing the Spanish Heath (Erica lusitanica) in the grass and sags

For more photos see the album here

Comments