It’s outplanting season!!
Winter 2026 plant-outs are underway, with the first 120 ‘kelpings’ now at their new home at Mahanga Bay
Winter is making itself felt, and the ocean is getting colder, which means it’s seaweed planting season, baby! Those Giant Kelp just love the cooler waters.
The first green gravel outplanting got underway on Wednesday, 2 April, and one hundred and twenty little seaweeds went into the water at our site at Mahanga Bay. This is the earliest in the winter season that we’ve ever managed to get seaweeds into our restoration sites, and the hope is that this will maximise their time in cold winter oceans, supporting them to grow and establish more before next summer - when higher and more stressful ocean temperatures return.
Keeping the little kelpings in the temperature-controlled nursery over the summer has enabled us to slow their growth by limiting light and available nutrients. This means we’ve been able to respond to falling ocean temperatures almost instantaneously, with our first lot of green-gravel ready to go as soon as ocean conditions were right.
Spools of seeding string for suspended lines, green gravel ready to go, and ‘mother rocks’ covered with seaweeds.
Along with our green gravel rocks, we are also revisiting the suspended substrate trials, with the first seeded rope scheduled to go in mid-May 2026. There was some initial success with the trials last winter, and we’re hopeful that through everything we learned, we’ll see more success yet.
This is likely to be our last season of active kelp outplanting as funding winds up, and so we are focused on refining and strengthening all of our techniques. Everything we’re learning at Love Rimurimu is intended to be shared with others in the restoration space. That’s why we created the Love Rimurimu Toolkit and other resources to support the community in their own endeavours.
We’re very excited, and a touch sad, about the final season ahead (for now!) We’ll be updating you regularly, so watch this space!
Zoe is always happiest when she gets an excuse to be in the water