The Sri Sathya Sai Group is a spiritual organisation whose members make a commitment to community service The group have made many contributions to the CUE Haven restoration project over the years—assisting with planting, painting the nursery and walking track maintenance.  Today seventeen members gave up their Sunday morning to help us with some restoration planting.

The group arrived first thing in the morning and included Anil, Anurag, Ashneel, Atish, Bibi, Dharma, Kavish, Mark, Mitchell, Munu, Nishkala, Praveen, Sai, Sai, Selva, Serel and Udaya.

Also joining us for the day was our friend Richard.

Several of the group were new to CUE Haven so we took some time to get acquainted over morning tea.  Mahrukh gave an introduction to the CUE Haven project and Thomas then gave a safety briefing and a description of the work planned for the day.

The plan was to plant pioneer trees in two areas.  The first is  an area that had initially been planted in 2013 but needed to have some gaps filled in to provide a canopy for bigger trees.  The other area was where the trees cover had been lost in the heavy rainstorms in 2023 that caused slips on some of the steep slopes around the property.

We had earlier prepped the planting areas by spraying out the kikuyu grass that had grown over the areas and which was preventing trees from getting established.

We drove up in two groups and Thomas repeated the safety briefing and gave a planting demonstration.  The first task was carrying the plants to the site.

The group then broke up into teams, spread out throughout the planting site and went to work.

As they planted out an area they moved to new spaces that needed to be filled in.

One challenge the group faced was clearing away thick dead kikuyu grass before they could plant.

Another challenge was that there was steep terrain in some of the planting areas.

And we really appreciate the team’s willingness to tackle the steep sections.

Periodically throughout the day, the group had to contend with some light drizzle but it didn’t slow them down.

The planting was hard work but everyone kept smiling.

In a few hours the teams managed to plant all of the trees we had for them in spite of the challenging conditions. Well done!!

They then gathered up all of the spades and empty trays to take back down.

Most of the team then explored the rest of the property by walking back to the cottage.  After spending some time cleaning up, we had a relaxing lunch.

The team accomplished an amazing amount of planting in challenging conditions.  Thank you so very very much!

Many thanks to Anil for organising the volunteer day and to Selva and Anil for continuing to champion CUE Haven within the Sathya Sai organisation.

And a big thank you to Richard for joining us today and helping out.

Our heartfelt thanks to everyone for giving up your Sunday and coming out to help on a cold winter morning!  We really enjoyed meeting everyone and all the interesting conversations. And we very much appreciate your hard work and amazing contribution to CUE Haven.  The trees you have planted are a much needed addition to the CUE Haven reserve – what a wonderful legacy.

We hope you enjoyed the day as much as we did and do look forward to having you out again for another fun and productive volunteer day. And we also look forward to having you out with your friends and family for a leisurely visit soon to explore more of your community native forest reserve.

Thank You!! Thank You!!