Indigenous plants

Indigenous plants are adapted to the local soil and rainfall.

Weeds can smother newly sown or planted natives, so need to be removed before revegetating an area.

Direct seeding needs a large seed supply. Sowing seeds is cheaper than transplanting tube stock but seeds from some native plants are not always available.

Tube stock are plants in plastic tubes about 8 cm tall with a diameter of 4.25 cm. Tube stock plants are cheaper and quicker to plant out in a grassland site than plants in larger pots, and also cope better with transplanting. Increasingly, smaller hiko cells are being used to limit disturbance to soil and enabling planting to occur in rocky areas.

Kangaroo Grass can be direct seeded by laying a ‘mulch’ of cut Kangaroo Grass seed heads and stalks over bare soil. The mulch cover reduces the likelihood of weed seeds blowing in and becoming established there.

A mixture of seeds from grasses including Spear-grasses, Wallaby-grasses, Kangaroo Grass and Red-leg Grass may be more successful than planting seeds from one species.

Many threatened plants including orchids, lilies and daisies grow from tubers or bulbs. For some species it may be more reliable to establish these plants by planting their underground organs than by sowing their seeds.

Native orchids are very difficult to establish as they rely on complex mycorrhizal associations.