Flora Victoria grows our seed in a seed production area (SPA), and this is where most of our seed comes from. When we started our crops, we sourced the seed mainly from areas within the Werribee and Keilor Plains and from the North of Melbourne on the Basalt soils except for Austrostipa scabra, which comes from sedimentary soils on the edge of the basalt plain near Bacchus Marsh.
Many initial collections came from populations that no longer exist, mainly due to housing and commercial development. This is one of the reasons we wanted to produce a SPA, many seed sources are disappearing, leaving those left vulnerable and over harvested. I also noticed many of these harvesting sites becoming weedier over only a few years, and during the last drought many populations produced a negligible amount of seed. All these factors can be overcome in a well-equipped SPA if enough resources are available.
Our grass seed is harvested using a tractor and brush harvester.
The seed we currently grow, and their provenances are as follows:
Themeda triandra – Altona
Bothriochloa macra – Between Melton and Werribee
Dichanthium sericeum – Keilor
Rytidosperma spp. – Tarneit
Rytidosperma spp. – Sydenham
Microlaena stipoides – Attwood
Poa Labillardieri – Yan Yean
Poa sieberiana – Werribee Plains
Austrostipa scabra – Bacchus Marsh
Austrostipa elegantissima – Brimbank
Wildflowers are another topic and we are in the early stages of producing seed, so I’ll leave that for next year when we hope to have small amounts available for retail sales.
Unfortunately, we are out of all seed until early next year, and when it is available it will only be in small quantities for retail sales. Wholesale sales are not profitable enough for us to operate our SPA, so the bulk of our seed is being produced for our own projects.
