The City of Greater Geraldton Community Nursery on Pass St is very much alive and well and is about to relocate to a new site at Waggrakine.

Men of the Trees (MoTT) previously operated the community nursery on behalf of the City, however the organisation’s contract has since expired and operations have slowed down as the nursery gets ready for the move to its new site.

City Senior Environmental and Sustainability Officer, Robyn Nicholas, said operations at the nursery have slowed and potting activities have stopped as the nursery gets ready to move.

“Volunteers were involved in the nursery’s production, however the seedlings are now being looked after until mature enough for planting and they don’t need a lot of volunteer effort in the nursery at the moment,” she said.

“However, volunteers will be needed to plant seedlings at upcoming planting days, including at Chapman River this Sunday (July 21) at 2pm at Fairfax Rd.

“The City values the significant volunteer involvement in growing the seedlings and plans to foster more volunteer relationships in the future.”

The City’s Environment and Sustainability team is looking forward to relocating to the new, larger site at Waggrakine at the end of the growing season, and is in the process of finishing the site with the fencing completed and gravel laid.

The community nursery came about from community input with the Friends of Bluff Point coastal group calling for additional locally-grown plants to help with their restoration work.

“Initially the group was growing seedlings in their own backyards and then called on the City to help,” said Ms Nicholas.

“The site at Pass St was established and has been gradually growing to its current capacity of 30,000 local native species’ seedlings; the new site at Waggrakine has the capacity to grow up to 200,000.”

As part of the City’s award-winning 2029 and Beyond project, where the number one desire was to see more trees planted in Greater Geraldton, the Million Trees initiative was born.

Since then, the community as a whole including individuals, community groups, schools, businesses and industry and the City have planted more than 60,000 trees.

“Once the nursery has been relocated to Waggrakine, the community will be able to source native seedlings for this aspirational flagship project,” Ms Nicholas said.

“This year the community has partnered with the City in tree planting events held at Maitland Park, the Chapman River mouth, Chapman Regional Park and Back Beach with more than 60 volunteers from a range of backgrounds getting involved.

Community nursery volunteers who would like to be involved in planting the seedlings they have helped grow or anyone else interested in planting trees can contact the City’s Environment and Sustainability Team for information on planned planting events.

Over the past few weeks there have been six planting events around Geraldton, using about 6,000 plants from the community nursery; they included:

Tree Planting at Chapman River, Moresby with UWA and Nagle students on June 28
Community Tree Planting Day at both Back Beach and Chapman River on June 29
Community Tree Planting at Back Beach (repeat) on June 30
Tree planting at Chapman River with Leaning Tree Community School and

Durack Institute of Technology on July 2
Tree planting at Chapman River, Moresby with Durack Institute of Technology

on July 3
Corporate Tree Planting at Back Beach on July 5 with the City and Durack.

In addition to this, the City’s Parks and Gardens team has been planting coastal species on local dunes over the past few weeks – using some of the community nursery seedlings. More tree planting activities are planned for later this month (July).