Month: May 2021

Categories
General

Thornhill Park Project Video

We have been working on various aspects of the landscaping and planting of Thornhill Park since 2019. Located in the Northwest of Melbourne, this is a large new residential community where Australian Ecosystems have been working to landscape and restore waterways, wetlands and greenspace, with social and environmental benefits.

Working with Wel. Co and Winslow Constructors, and following designs from Spiire, we conditioned the topsoil and installed 10 hectares of jute mat, a huge area that is best appreciated from the air as captured in this short film.

At another site in Thornhill Park in 2019; we prepared the site soil, installed jutemat and mulch, installed rockwork, formal planting areas and structures and planted the site with 35,000 plants. After maintaining this site for two years, it has established and is now a beautiful landscape for residents to enjoy. We installed a viewing platform at this reserve that has a sign that reads:

“This wetland helps protect the environment by capturing and cleaning stormwater from local roads and roofs. This constructed systems mimics and natural filtration cycle, cleaning the water as it travels through the ponds. This cleaning helps protect Kororoit Creek and the surrounding ecosystem. It is also a great habitat asset to support local biodiversity.”

This is why we do what we do, and we love doing it.

Categories
General Nursery

Our nursery highlighted as a stellar educator and employer!

​Thanks to the Nursery and Garden Industry Victoria for including a write-up about our nursery in the latest edition of Groundswell!

We have received the Employer of the Year award from Holmesglen TAFE in 2020 and 2019, showing our commitment to our apprentices and passion for educating future generations of horticulturalists.

We opened our nursery almost 25 years ago to address the need for native wetland plants to improve Melbourne’s waterways, and are so happy to continue doing just that to this day.

Check out this article to read more about our educational opportunities for apprentices, how we build a great community in our workplace, and our sustainability initiatives.


You can read the full article here

Categories
Nursery

Sustainability @ AE: Reusable and returnable plant trays!

Over the years, the nursery industry has worked on many sustainable innovations including reducing and recycling plastic waste. From our experience working on our large landscaping projects, we saw the need to implement circular economy principles by reducing plastic waste and moving away from single-use plastic pots to developing our own multi-plant trays.

We design and manufacture our own unique moulded 200CC and 600CC trays that after use can be sterilised in our pot washer and re-used many times. Once their lifecycle is complete, they can then be recycled into another plastic product.

Before delivering your plants from our nursery, we put the trays through our popper machine, which lifts the plant out of the cell for easy handling. The trays can be clipped onto planting belts for fast planting, and as a bonus you no longer have to collect all the single-use plastics after a job! This speeds up planting efficiencies and helps with OH&S. To incentivise our clients to return trays to us, we offer a deposit refund on all returned trays. It’s almost like we are paying you to recycle!

We believe that once you start using our moulded multi-use plant trays, you’ll enjoy all the benefits and efficiencies they bring. If you are a landscaper, you know the importance of efficient planting of large amounts of plants, while reducing the waste produced in your operations and time spent cleaning up at the end of the project. Feel free to get in touch with our nursery now for a sustainable solution and quality native and indigenous plants!