Some of our kānukas are not doing well in Hawke's Bay
Blog post.
Tom Mackay-Smith and Raphael Spiekermann
3/4/20252 min read
We recently visited one of our planting sites at Mangarara, Greg Hart’s farm near Elsthorpe.
The paddock we planted at Greg’s farm in winter 2024 was the toughest one we planted, and we’ve seen some really interesting results.
Rainfall at the farm was 70 mm from mid-August to mid-December, but then there was 230 mm over the Christmas-New Year period.
The kānukas we planted are either doing well, or, if not already dead, were close to dying, and the recent rain has encouraged some regrowth.
A thriving kānuka seedling:
A ‘basically dead’ kānuka:
Interestingly, in the neighbouring paddock, kānuka were planted at the same time using the regular pre-spraying method without tree guards in a retired paddock.
Interestingly, they are doing much better than the kānukas in the sleeves.
Check out the photos below:
When we planted with our current guard version, we scraped away the soil to minimise weed competition and create a level surface for the guard. One cause could be the pre-sprayed grass mulch retained moisture for the seedlings during the dry spell following planting.
Alternatively, the plastic sleeve may have resulted in higher temperatures around the plant due to a lack of circulation and increased evapotranspiration.
This information is really useful as we test our new guard.
We will measure survival and growth after summer. It will be interesting to compare these results with those from our other sites and look for trends in the establishment data within the paddock and across different regions.
