Wairakei Village Planting 2023
In 2021 the pine forest in Wairakei Village was felled and the hills across the road from the school became bare. We asked whether the land could be planted into native forest and if so, whether the local school children could be involved. It was very exciting to find out that the answer was YES!
Unfortunately, before any planting could happen, the area needed a big clean up. For many decades it had been a place where people dumped their waste. Although large items like cars and whiteware had been removed, the ground was littered with smaller items. In 2023, the school children worked with Tidy Taupō and Shannon from Taupō District Council to do big rubbish pick ups. They also helped Shawn ‘The Vegetator’ Vennell to lay out thousands of native plants for the big community planting event. This was hard work on rough terrain!
The native planting in Wairakei Village was dedicated to Joe McCreadie, who did a lot of volunteer work on Wairakei Drive, as well as mowing Wairakei Primary School's field for free for almost 40 years. His grandson's class at the school, along with their buddy class, learnt all about our native lizard species, then planted a special lizard habitat around the entrance to the large planting site with plants donated by First Credit Union.
On the day of the big planting event, the Wairakei community turned up in force to help us plant a native forest in the village. About 300 people came along to plant 3000 native trees. They were in the ground in no time! Contact Energy donated ice cream for the hard working volunteers and Greening Taupo cooked them sausages. It was a fantastic community event.
We also celebrated Conservation Week in Wairakei Village! Seven classes from Wairakei Primary School joined us to support The 'Vegetator' Vennell Team, Greening Taupo Wicked Weeders, and Tidy Taupo to do another big rubbish clean up and to plant the last of the native trees. Now there are 9000 native trees planted where a pine forest was once a dumping ground for rubbish! They will bring back biodiversity, and in the future be a native forest that the tamariki will be proud to have created. We have to thank Shawn and the The 'Vegetator' Vennell Team for all the work that they have put into this site.
After the big planting, Wairakei Primary School students really got on a roll and wanted to continue to improve their local environment. Many classes took on predator monitoring in their school grounds and several classes built trap boxes with Predator Free Taupō and Call of the Wild. These traps were set around their school grounds and in their school gully. Wairakei Village students have made traps to set up a backyard trapping network too
Four classes did guided tours of Opepe forest with us. They were amazed at the size of the big trees and the amount of biodiversity in the native forest. They found bugs and saw birds such as kererū, popokotea, riroriro, and miromiro. They hope that one day the new forest in their village will be like that too!
