Donations flood in to make Porangahau farm greener

Hundreds of donations for the trees have flooded in from the Hawke's Bay community. Photo / Supplied

Central Hawke's Bay farmer Sam Clark is giving back to the environment by covering his Porangahau farm in native trees, but he needs community help in order to do it.

His family have been farming "Arlie" in Wanstead since 1929 and he and his wife are now the fifth generation living on the sheep and beef block.

Working alongside the NZ Landcare Trust they will plant 1000 metres of the creek with 4700 native plants and trees this year. The project is costing a total of $29,000, or $29 per metre and there's only a few days to make a donation.

"It's really important to us as a family to enhance and improve our environment for the future and this has motivated us in implementing the riparian project on Airlie.

"My mum and my brother James are especially mad about trees and have been a huge source of wisdom," Clark says.

"We've already done some planting on the farm in the past and always focused on using native plants. Some of the trees were grown from seeds eco-sourced from small pockets of bush out the back of the farm and it has been great to watch them grow.

"One of the focuses has been a main habitat corridor up the Wanstead valley that has been created for native wood pigeon and we'd like to offer them and other native birds more bush to find feed and living space."

Clark says another hope is that the number of frog and hoverflies increases as well as other insects, thus creating a small balanced ecosystem on the family property, so that future generations can also enjoy the variety of New Zealand's native plants and animals.

Last year they planted more than 400 plants from sedges near the water for filtration, tree lucerne as nursery trees, cabbage trees, flax, pittosporums, ake ake, karamu, hebe, manuka and more.

To make a donation to the project, go to https://millionmetres.org.nz and search under Hawke's Bay projects.