Sowing Danthonia seed.

With the demand for native grass seed increasing and its availability decreasing, remnant grasslands are under more pressure as sources of indigenous seed. With a lack of consistent rainfall over the last few years some native grass species have produced very little seed and the steady rate of remnants that are lost to development make seed harder to obtain.

These pressures on native grasslands, along with the weed seed often associated with the harvesting of remnant grasslands are some of the reasons that Flora Victoria has started large-scale production of native grass seed sourced from the Basalt Plains to the North and West of Melbourne.

The seed we are producing has been collected from large healthy populations within a 40 km radius of Melbourne on basalt soils starting from Little River, up to Melton and across to Yan Yean. If clients have a particular provenance they require and a good seed source is available, it may be possible to produce large quantities of clean seed from one harvest of a remnant rather than plundering its seed every year.

Flora Victoria has commenced the sowing of several species and hopes to have some seed available for sale next year. Large quantities of seed will probably not be available until 2011.

Some of the species that have been sown and will be available by 2011 are:

Danthonia (a mix of species that will be announced) Chloris truncata Bothriochloa macra Dicanthium sericeum Themeda triandra

This page will be updated to reflect our progress and the possible availability of the above species as the crops progress and we hope to have a field day some time next spring.

Newly sown Danthonia area.

So far about 3 hectares of Danthonia has been sown and small plots of Stipa scabra and Stipa mollis. Our next sowing will be about .5 of a hectare of Poa labillardierei and a plot of Microlaena stipoides.