Category Archives: Fire
Why not to wait 20 years between burns
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.
Click on any picture for a bigger one. -jsq
Day 1: Planted pines
Continue readingTame fire
setting fire to the woods
Protracted extreme drought: U.S. Drought Monitor, 2012-05-08
Acording to U.S. Drought Monitor, drought throughout south Georgia and surrounding areas is either extreme or exceptional, and has been for months.
Here you can see detail for Georgia:
Continue readingGreening and candling burned longleaf
Here’s a slideshow.
Pictures by John S. Quarterman 29 February 2012.
-jsq
Burning some piney woods 2012 01 31
Pictures and videos by John S. Quarterman and Gretchen Quarterman, 31 January 2012.
Fortunately these vines were mostly in invasive exotics anyway (chinaberry, mimosa, Japanese privet) that had grown up along the field edge. After a few minutes, here’s the result.
Most of the rest of the woods burned much more evenly, with flames only a foot or two above the ground.
Burning planted longleaf, 16 December 2011
Burning planted longleaf, Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, 16 December 2011.
The longleaf themselves are the most fire-resistant of trees. Almost all of these longleaf will survive the fire and thrive. The volunteer loblolly and slash, not so much, and any oaks or other trees even less, so fire favors the longleaf. We had perfect burning conditions: 5-8 MPH wind from the northwest, blowing towards the road.
Some of the subdivision neighbors who are not familiar with prescribed burns called the county fire department. They came out, took one look at the firebreak, and filed a report saying all was OK.
Here’s how the fire got started. Some pyromaniac dribbling fire….
Here’s a slideshow and a playlist of some videos. Continue reading
The Art of Managing Longleaf
The Art of Managing Longleaf: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.
A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
by Leon Neel, with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way.
It starts back in the old days of Leon Neel’s youth when his daddy taught him to hunt quail: Continue reading