We started the planting season in June 2024 by planting along Moemoea, the track on the upper slopes that connects us to the Berhampore Golf Course to the north and Tawatawa Reserve to the south. It's become an increasingly popular track, so we put in some effort to improve the track surface too. As it is quite high up the slope, it gets very dry in the summertime. For this reason, most of what we plant is lower-growing species that can tolerate the dry conditions and lower soil fertility. We use this to our advantage to put in locally uncommon shrubs like mingimingi.
Where there are folds in the hillside with small gullies (with better soil that holds moisture further into summer) we can put in things like totara, rewarewa and titoki in the open spots, and under established trees we add nikau, poporokaiwhiri and kohekohe. We also added a few more rata, following from the success of last year's rata plantings. Some of those flowered last summer, despite being less than 1m high.
We also focused on Te Uma I Mokotia, a track that runs roughly east-west through Manawa Karioi, linking up to Moemoea. The track surface was widened in places, and slightly rerouted in the centre stretch to make it easier to walk up and to reduce erosion.
Our planting is focusing a lot more on expanding biodiversity, with forest giants such as kahikatea, totara, matai and miro featuring more. We put in close to 30 of these podocarps (ancient conifer trees) this year.
While much of the current forest canopy at Manawa Karioi is currently ngaio, mahoe matipo and pittosporums, these will eventually become sub-canopy as the tawa, kohekohe and titoki that we have been planting in increasing numbers take over.