2024 President’s Report

As explained in my review earlier this year (Review of the 2023-24 seed collection season), we had a great collection time and found many previously difficult species. Our depot space is now consolidated and we have plenty of room to clean even in unfavourable conditions.

The education event with students from Community College Gippsland was successfully completed and hopefully they learnt something! Thank you to those who gave up their time to do this. There may be future opportunities but we will wait and see.

Our exploration of collection sites early in the season proved very useful and we will endeavour to do this again this year to confirm species availability, with a particular focus on Eucalypts as the quantities of these were down a little last season.

Marion has created an amazing resource for seed identification to complement our ID book, with seed samples for easy reference to know exactly what you are looking for when cleaning. Thanks, Marion! The ID book is an ongoing project as it is very time consuming and difficult to transfer information between programs with all details and photographs. (A sub-committee has now been formed to investigate outside assistance.)

The new laptop is very good and it is felt we were treated very well by the computer firm, Warragul Computer Repair. Hopefully it will stand us in good stead well into the future. Thanks to those who organised all that.

The big news! Thanks to a concerted effort particularly by Merrin and Joyce (with assistance from Wendy and myself) we are now a registered charity which means that we no longer have to apply for tax exemption and fill in miles of paperwork. This took approximately twenty hours of computer time to complete as well as much searching for appropriate paperwork. Well done!

Thank you as always for being such a jolly great bunch of people!

Lorraine Hobgen
President of the West Gippsland Seedbank Association Inc