Last week Gretchen and I had to search to find a few pounds of okra. This morning, Terry Davis and I picked 44 pounds of okra:
Terry Davis and the okra
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 25 June 2012.
Picking up:
Continue readingElsie and the river book:
At 100 101 years and four months, Vanderbilt Emerita Prof. of Plant Ecology Elsie Quarterman sat up to see these pictures. Later she started paging through it to see some of them again.
Wayne Morgan has taken thousands of photographs of the Satilla River, especially in Brantley County.
-jsq
Potatoes red and white, peas, onions, turnips, collards, and radishes!
Here’s a playlist:
Growing in the Garden
Gretchen Quarterman explains it all for you, assisted by Brown Dog and Yellow Dog.
Videos by John. S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 27 March 2012.
-jsq
Kim Cleary Sadler,
Assistant Professor of Biology at Middle Tennessee State University
and co-Director of the
Center for Cedar Glade Studies.
(Student of
Thomas “Tom” Ellsworth Hemmerly, who was teaching and couldn’t come.)
Dr. Elsie Quarterman, Professor Emerita of Plant Ecology, Vanderbilt University
Carol C. Baskin, Professor of Biology, University of Kentucky
There were classes, botany walks, owl hoots, and musicians.
Here’s the schedule.
It was sunny this year,
unlike last year’s great flood.
Next year, you should come!
Get out of town, take a walk in the glades.
Elsie got a guided tour, with
Tennessee State Naturalist Emeritus Mack Pritchard
and his successor Randy Hedgepath.
Here they are with Elsie’s nephew Patrick Quarterman,
while Gretchen Quarterman photographs a glade.
Here
State Naturalist Randy Hedgepath
consults with Dr. Quarterman about identification of a cedar glade plant.
Elsie got out of the car to look at this one with Randy and Ann Quarterman: Continue reading
Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest,
by Lawrence S. Earley
The tallest and strongest of pine trees, longleaf made great sailing ship masts , tar for caulking ships, and of course saw timber. How the early settlers cut down trees for houses and to clear land to farm. Their hogs and cows running loose in the woods ate the young longleaf, suppressing new trees for a hundred years. Then professional forestry took over, trying to suppress the fire that destroyed northern white pine forests, yet which preserves southern longleaf pine forests. The sad story of turpentine: we knew better, but we did it anyway.
The peculiar life cycle of a tree that starts out looking like a clump of grass, and can stay that way for decades, yet promotes and survives fire and can grow more than 100 feet tall and live for centuries. The thousands of species of plants, animals, and fungi the forest protects, many of them, like wiregrass, also adapted to fire.
How tuberculosis and quail led to new understandings of longleaf and fire, and the people who discovered those things. We do know how to grow these trees now, and lots of people are doing it: for jobs, for sawtimber, for the beauty of the forest.
Rob Goldstein writes in Conservation Maven:
A new study finds that organic farming promotes biodiversity compared to conventional agricultural practices. While past research has found similar results, this particular study is groundbreaking in that it detected ecological benefits from organic farming at both a local and a landscape level.It’s always good to see research validate what we see on the ground (pun intended).Researchers looked at the uncultivated, semi-natural borders between organic and conventional agricultural fields in Sweden. They found that the borders between organic fields had significantly higher plant species richness and abundance. The researchers hypothesize that this is likely due, at least in part, to the unintentional impact that herbicides can have on non-target species.
This is good news and not just for plants. Increases in plant species diversity likely trickle up the food chain benefiting the insects that eat plants (and the birds that eat insects).
Picture by Gretchen, 17 August 2008.
A remnant of the original longleaf pine forest.
This is a composite picture, since it’s hard to get the whole tree in a single frame.
Update: This tree was chopped down and burned in 2008 by the county in the name of progress.