If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty and you’re passionate about keeping precious plants free of pests, then you might have what it takes to be a ‘Squishy’ volunteer at the Australian National Botanic Gardens. For nearly two years volunteers have been lending a helping hand to the gardens’ many greenhouses for a few hours once a week. It’s rewarding work— if you’re not too squeamish.
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00:00It can be satisfying and sometimes it can just be really disgusting.
00:10So when we grow plants in a greenhouse they tend to develop lots of soft lush growth which
00:15is prime fodder for pest insects and somehow the pests find their way in here so our job
00:22and the job of our excellent squishy volunteers is to help keep those as under control as
00:27we can.
00:28This one is a constant thing that we're always dealing with but these ones are covered in
00:34a little scale and because the leaves are very delicate you have to be very careful
00:40in taking them off so I'm just using the point of this tool just to gently scrape off the
00:46little scales.
00:48These foenia plants are a real magnet for brown scale.
00:54They tend to hide underneath the leaves so what we want to do is wipe that off but also
00:59just make sure we're getting any of the babies that might be hiding underneath.
01:04These plants are destined to go into the Ian Potter National Conservatory so a lot of the
01:08plants that you see here in the glass houses will be on display for the public to see.
01:12A lot of plants we can actually store the seeds in our seed bank but a lot of the plants
01:18we simply can't store it in a seed bank so in order to help with conservation we really
01:22need to create a really good living collection where we can harvest the seeds straight from
01:27these plants and it's just fantastic to be able to help the health of these plants by
01:32removing any pests and diseases.
01:34Yeah it's just simply a joy.
01:36I mean when we first looked at this tree this morning it had quite a lot of scale on it
01:40and to be able to just methodically work through that, remove it all and then at the end of
01:44the session know that that tree is going to be fine for the next few months and we'll
01:49certainly be a lot happier and healthier.
01:51So that's a real sense of achievement at the end of each session knowing that we've been
01:54able to do something positive like that.