Plan. Prepare. Plant.

I am currently without volunteers.

It feels strange.

But the days are full of planning and preparing for an onslaught of volunteers in a week and a half's time. We shall be awash with International Student Volunteers (ISV) members coming with the expectation of planting. A lot.

Dave has primed them well, and the planning stage is almost over - plants are arriving, a variety of species dependent on certain types of terrain and water-hardiness, and the paddocks for planting were allocated a long time ago.

So now we prepare.

• We have pegged out areas in the paddocks by wet, wetter, wettest.... welcome to the West Coast!
• We are allocating a number of species to certain areas.
• We are planning how many plants per square metre will be needed.
• We are making sure we have enough tools and wet weather gear.
• We are preparing various anti-nibble devices to protect the plants.
• We are double checking everything once more.

I think we're almost there, and we've still got a week before they arrive.

Around the time of the official partnering meeting, we should have around 30 volunteers on ground, and by my calculations (weather depending......) we should have around 5000 plants in the paddock - getting on toward 1/3 of the year's total.

As the kiwis would say, "Good as Gold"