Bad luck if you live in Melbourne
The Victorian Government recently announced that as from on midnight 8 July Stage 3 Covid-19 restrictions apply to the population of the greater Melbourne area for a period of 6 weeks.
We have not yet received advice from Parks Victoria what this means for our program of volunteer activities during this time. However it would be safe to assume that volunteers residing in greater Melbourne will not be allowed to attend our activities.
We will keep you updated as we receive more information
Recent rule change under Covid-19 restrictions
Following a recent spike in the number of Covid-19 cases reported in Victoria, the state government has limited outdoor gatherings to 10 people.
Parks Victoria has established some rules for volunteers in parks designed to safeguard the health of volunteers and staff and help slow the spread of Covid-19 –
- Volunteers must pre-register on ParkConnect for all activities. (ParkConnect is Parks Victoria’s on-line portal for all volunteer activity across the State)
- The upper limit on volunteer numbers for outdoor activities has been reduced from 20 to 10. We will regulate numbers of volunteers via ParkConnect, and if there are more pre-registrations than places, we will give preference to Friends of the Prom paid-up members. Given that the limit was recently reduced from 20 to 10, we have the option of setting up an additional activity if there are more than 10 registrations. The limit on group size would then be 10 for any one activity.
- Volunteers must sign in before starting work and sign out after finishing work.
- Volunteers must take the usual measures at all times to reduce the risk of Covid-19 transmission. This includes being symptom-free for 2 weeks prior to attending an event, maintaining social distancing and hand hygiene, and no sharing of food or food utensils etc.
Sea Spurge project update
Hardly a Sea Spurge weed in sight…… This photo was taken at Squeaky Beach on 10 June 2020 after two Sea Spurge weeding events were missed – one last November cut short due to bad weather, the other in March due to the Covid-19 restrictions. Many thanks to Parks Victoria rangers who spent some time in this area pulling out Sea Spurge regrowth while volunteers were locked out.
Further down the beach is a bad pocket of Sea Spurge regrowth. We will hit this area in spring.
How are those trees going that we planted last year for koala habitat?
This little Swamp Gum is thriving after being planted in May 2019 – it is protected from grazing animals by our steel mesh tree-guards. Photo taken 10 June 2020.
The Swamp Gum inside this tree-guard was planted about 10 year ago but failed to thrive because of grazing animals. We put a guard around the struggling tree in July 2018 and it hasn’t looked back. Photo taken 10 June 2020.
We are back in production
(l to r) Peter, Dale, Geoff, John, Harry and Bill (behind the camera) social distancing in front of their handiwork (25 June 2020)
After the general Covid-19 lock-down, we built 115 tree guards over two days . That brings the total number of complete tree guards to 147 – only 93 to go.
