Seed collection - a wild adventure

Many years ago I travelled to the wilds of Borneo where we traversed the Kinabatangan River in the hope of sighting the Proboscis Monkey.

Our initial excitement began to wane after several hours of scanning the dense vegetation for a sighting. Even though our expert guides knew what to look for, a sighting eluded us.

My first seed collecting adventure also involved scanning the vegetation, but for a different reason. This time we were in search of local native trees bearing clusters of fruit and were not to return empty handed!

As our 4WD crawled slowly along the dirt roads, our eyes inspecting the canopy cover of native trees in search of fruit and our expert guides, Bruce Smith and Dennis Hayles, knew exactly what to look for.

But I was being eluded again. Without seed there are no new trees, and the outcome today was looking grim indeed. Due to successive dry years, trees are stressed and many have died. There was little seed available or in some cases the seed had already burst from their pods.

A determined team, we persevered and did manage to return with several chaff bags of seed.

The process of seed collecting starts with collection of fruit or seed pods which are picked by the team and then spread out in an igloo to dry. The seed once dried is cleaned, sorted and bagged ready for use in the Direct Seeding and Tree Scheme programs.

Bruce runs workshops where you learn plant and seed identification, how to collect the seed. With our state divided into 42 zones, it is often difficult to source the seed from more remote regions. If you can contribute in some way to this vital program either through seed collecting on your own property and contributing it to the program or helping out by coming to seed collection days please phone 8406 0500 to register your interest.