Community action for the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor

In the 2022-23 CoPower democratic budget customer members voted to allocate $20,000 to the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor, an 8km community-led and -maintained wildlife corridor designed with over 20 scientists and specialists for native bees and other pollinating insects. It aims to link the Royal Botanic Gardens to Westgate Park through the inner southern suburbs of Melbourne.

After 18 months of community engagement, digging and mulching we have this update from the Heart Gardening team on the impact of this funding.

“At The Heart Gardening Project our work is all about connecting people to nature in cities,”” said founder Emma Cutting. “We now have 36 MPC gardens over 3 suburbs covering over 1500m2! Over 100,000 individuals walk past these gardens each year with total visits topping 1,000,000! The impact from these gardens is already huge and will continue to grow – our pollinating insects have more safe places to feed and live, locals enjoy the gardens and learn more about these critters, our kids learn from watching us helping nature…and this work gives people big and small hope that we can create positive action for nature here in the city.”

This Copower funding achieved a huge amount on 7 diverse gardens of the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor covering 500m2:

• 3 in community gardens,
• 3 on Moray St, South Melbourne next to each other,
• And we completed the vital site preparation on a huge 450m2 nature strip outside Port Melbourne Primary School.

A few hundred plants were planted, many volunteers of all ages connected to the project and the gardens are still going strong!

The sheet mulching that we did at Port Melbourne Primary will be killing off all the grass without chemicals to help with land management long term and make sure, the garden has the best chance of success.