Tag Archives: Gretchen Quarterman

Full moon with clouds

She never saw a moon she didn’t want to photograph.

Gretchen and the moon

Gretchen got some much better pictures with a real camera and a tripod; see her facebook page. There were dogs there, too, but it was too dark for the cameras to see them. Here are a few more pictures from my phone. Continue reading →

Prescribed burns

Gretchen and I burned some woods the last couple days. Here’s why we burn: longleaf pine unharmed, while small trees of other species (slash and loblolly pine, an especially oaks) are weeded out by the fire.

Why we burn: longleaf unharmed

Click on any picture for a bigger one. -jsq

Day 1: Planted pines

Continue reading →

Registration open for South Georgia Growing Local 2016

Registration is open now for the annual conference on local food and local agriculture, South Georgia Growing Local 2016, to be held Saturday 26 February 2016 at Pine Grove Middle School, Lowndes County, Georgia.

You can register online or print a form and send it with a check: follow this link.

On that same page you will find links to pictures, videos, and other material from previous years, as well as Continue reading →

Shelling red corn

Got to turn that big old crank
Got to spin that flywheel around
Got to shell that red kernel corn
So we’ll have some grits and corn meal.

Here’s the video:


Gretchen Quarterman, Shelling red corn
Video by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms,
Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 November 2015.

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Smut no more: tasty corn fungus!

Corn smut a delicacy? Well, if truffles can be, why not?

Jill Neimark, the salt, 24 August 2015, Scourge No More: Chefs Invite Corn Fungus To The Plate,

One evening last July, Nat Bradford walked along rows of White Bolita Mexican corn at his Sumter, S.C., farm, and nearly wept. All 1,400 of the corn plants had been overtaken almost overnight by corn smut, recalls Bradford, who’s also a landscape architect. The smut, from a fungus called Ustilago maydis, literally transforms each corn kernel into a bulbous, bulging bluish-grey gall. It is naturally present in the soil and can be lofted easily into the air and onto plants.

Smut is considered a scourge by most U.S. farmers, and it goes by the nickname “devil’s corn.” Just one discolored kernel typically renders an ear completely unsellable….

Yep, that’s the way we’ve usually considered it. But keep reading: Continue reading →

Elsie Quarterman, Hall of Fame, Tennessee Botanists

2011 inductee, Tennessee Botanists Hall of Fame, Elsie Quarterman,

Elsie Quarterman was born in 1910 in Georgia. She completed her undergraduate work at Georgia State Woman’s College in 1932. Post-graduate studies were done at Duke Univ. where she obtained her Ph.D. in 1949 under Henry J. Osting. She accepted a faculty position at Vanderbilt Univ. and later became the University’s first female department chair, heading the Biology Department in 1964.

Dr. Quarterman is best known for her work on the ecology and plant communities of the cedar glades of the Central Basin. She is widely recognized for the re-discovery of the Tennessee Coneflower (Echinacea tennesseensis) in 1969, a plant once thought to be extinct and subsequently the first plant endemic to Tennessee to be protected by the Endangered Species Act. She has received many honors including our very own TNPS Conservation Award. The Elsie Quarterman Cedar Glade State Natural Area was named in her honor in 1998.

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