05/11/2025. Future Forest – Broad bay. Grade 2.5. Combined. Leaders: Jenny Flack, Linda Partridge, Gwenda Farquharson, Pam Cocks.
After a bit of overnight rain in Broad Bay the weather was fine for our working bee at the Future Forest, third attempt lucky for us this time.Twenty nine keen hikers and trampers assembled at the Bacon St parking area where we were given our tool of the trade for the day, a sharp serrated edge knife with a lovely bright coloured handle.
Lala Frazer from the Hereweka Harbour Cone Charitable Trust gave us a talk on the history of the Future Forest and Duncan Ross gave us the all important health and safety talk, particularly on how to safely carry and use the knife when we were cutting out the weeds and grass around the trees.
We then proceeded along the path, past the orchard with its lovely blossoms and after a 15 minute walk up the hill, steepish in parts, we arrived in the area where we were to begin our task of release weeding.
Duncan gave us a demonstration of what was to be done .
Yan kindly distributed some lovely home made treats to add to our morning tea.
Well fed & coffeed we donned our garden gloves and got to the task in hand. It was quite hard work as we were working on a steep slope but once we got going we made good progress.
In many cases to weed around the plantings we needed to remove the wire cages that protected the trees, this was a task in itself, especially for some of us with less physical strength, however some teamed up for this work which proved very helpful. It was lunch time before we knew it.
We did another 45 mins of work after lunch then about half of the group proceeded to walk further up the hill to admire the lovely views while the less energetic walked back down the hill and back to the cars.
Well deserved refreshments were taken at The Duck cafe at Macandrew Bay & some enjoyed icecreams from the dairy.
Thanks to Lala and Duncan for their guidance and support and to all who participated in the working bee. Hopefully there weren’t too many sore muscles the next day.
Linda and team.
Link to background information and earlier tramps and hikes in the same area.