Tag Archives: University of Georgia

Designing Edible Landscapes –Katherine Melcher @ SOGALO17 2017-01-21

Katherine Melcher and students will talk about Designing Edible Landscapes Edible Landscape at South Georgia Growing Local 2017, January 21, 2017 in Valdosta, Georgia:

In this talk, we will present the work of UGA Tifton students whose task was to implement an edible landscape design for the Future Farmstead, a net-zero energy residence on campus. Our design intent was to create a model sustainable landscape that could serve as an educational and inspirational site for home owners in the area.

The presentation will be divided into three parts:

  1. An overview of their landscape design process.
  2. Ideas for sustainable home landscapes that integrate water, soil, animal, plant, and human systems.
  3. Planting design recommendations and a selection of plants suitable for edible home landscapes in south Georgia.

Who should attend: Continue reading →

Pigweed on Georgia Farm Monitor

Dr. Stanley Culpepper of UGA Tifton says 52 counties have the mutant pigweed. He says they’re looking at cover crops and deep turning. (You may know that as plowing.) He hastily adds that they’re looking at other herbicides. But he wraps up by saying we have to look at other methods than herbicides: tillage and cover crops. He frames it as diversity and integration. What it really means is spraying poisons eventually breeds weeds that refuse to be poisoned. People, of course, are not so lucky.

This is the same Dr. Culpepper whose extensive slides on this subject I reviewed last summer.

-jsq

The Art of Managing Longleaf

The surprising thing is so few people have heard of Leon Neel. Here’s a very interesting biography of this very influential pioneer in southeastern forestry and agriculture, including many interesting stories of south Georgia and north Florida life and politics:
The Art of Managing Longleaf:
A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
by Leon Neel, with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way.
Leon Neel was a atudent, apprentice, and successor of Herbert Stoddard, who was originally hired by quail plantation owners around Thomasville to figure out why their quail populations were decreasing. The answer included a need to thin and especially to burn their longleaf pine tree forests. Stoddard and Neel studied and practiced for almost a century between them on how to preserve and increase the amount of standing timber and species diversity while also selectively harvesting trees to pay for the whole thing. Their Stoddard-Neel Approach is written up in textbooks. In this book we learn how it came about, and how it is basically different from the clearcut-thin-thin-clearcut “efficient” timbering cycle that is the current fad among pine tree growers in the southeast.

It starts back in the old days of Leon Neel’s youth when his daddy taught him to hunt quail: Continue reading →