The Bream Bay Coastal Care Trust was formed in 2006, primarily to assist the Department of Conservation with the care of approximately 700 hectares of coastal land, which comprise the Departments Bream Bay Coastal Estate. This coastal land which we consider a prime public asset is heavily weed infested with a variety of weeds including: pampas, acacia, gorse, tobacco weed, wild ginger, asparagus weed, agapanthus, cape ivy, wild pine and many others.

We hold monthly working bees at various locations along the coastline and seek to involve the local communities at each of these in caring for the area of coastline nearest to where they live.

Trust members have taken chainsaw courses in their own time to help us with this work.

We tend to concentrate on public entrance - ways to the beach. At the moment we have a number of live projects under way.

These are:

• Clearing acacia from duneland behind the Ruakaka Paradise Shores subdivision. We have organised a number of working bees here over the last two summers, pulling out seedling acacia and with several qualified people on chainsaws cutting down the larger bushes while others follow along behind spreading vigilant paste on the stumps. We hope to halt the movement southwards from Ruakaka towards Waipu of this weed and to allow the revegetion of native species, which at this location, is occurring naturally.

• Clearing a strip along the roadside at the approach to the Ruakaka Racecourse and planting this with appropriate native species. The area of duneland alongside the Ruakaka Racecourse is a mess of weeds. We hope to expand this project in the future but this year will be pleased if we can sort out the roadside strip. We have had one working bee ( in January) on this project pulling out cape ivy and other weeds, many of them the result of garden waste dumping. We plan further clearing, perhaps a spraying session in preparation for a winter planting working bee. We see working at this very visible location as a good opportunity to educate local people, hoping to persuade them to treat this duneland as a treasure rather then a rubbish tip.

• We have had two very successful working bees at the day visitor area alongside the Uretiti camping ground. This area was being abused by visitors with lots of rubbish dumped there and looked untidy with all the weeds growing over the fences and smothering earlier attempts to plant native trees.

We were given 100 locally seed sourced kanuka by a local nursery man and we planted these amongst the gorse which has successfully sheltered them from this summer’s easterly winds. We hope these will eventually shade out the gorse.

Department of Conservation workers did the initial clearing for us and we planted a number of native trees at the car park and beach entrance. DOC workers spread mulch around these and we went back to weed our plantings at our March working bee. We also chainsawed down some wildling pines which were growing in the dunes and, having been burned by this summer’s prevailing easterly winds, were looking pretty unsightly.

• We have held two successful working bees at Tip Rd. in Waipu with around 40 people turning up to help at each of these. We cleared weeds (mostly kikuyu and pampas) and planted cabbage trees, flax and pohutukawa here. We built a pedestrian track to the beach and nailed battens to a fence to direct vehicles which access the beach here to a single entrance way.

• We cleared weeds (kikuyu and pampas) from the entrance way to the Waipu Wildlife Refuge at Johnson’s Pt. Rd. and planted flax and pohutukawa here on a very stormy Sunday morning early last September. Unfortunately our plantings were all pulled out, we suspect by a hostile neighbour who seems to want the wildlife refuge downgraded to enable him to subdivide his land. As we have plenty more work to do at other locations we don’t intend to repeat this exercise until the situation here changes.