Three squirrels on the corn trailer! One jumped onto a tree, then Mama Squirrel walked down the dog ramp and shook her tail at me, while a fourth squirrel appeared:
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 4 May 2013.
While the dogs nap, a whole family of squirrels feasts on the corn.
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Pretty sure we’ve identified this flower correctly, since we planted it:
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 30 April 2013.
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Brown Dog prepares corn while Yellow Dog says it’s time for Valdosta Farm Days!
You can find Gretchen with rosemary and grits and corn meal from Okra Paradise Farms at the historic Lowndes County Courthouse today from 9 AM to 1PM.
Not quite ready today, but next time: potatoes.
Continue readingHow long will it take the U.S. to follow Europe’s ban of neonicotinoid pesticides, putting health of bees and food crop pollination ahead of corporate profit?
Damian Carrington wrote for the Guardian today, Bee-harming pesticides banned in Europe: EU member states vote ushers in continent-wide suspension of neonicotinoid pesticides,
Europe will enforce the world’s first continent-wide ban on widely used insecticides linked to serious harm in bees, after a European commission vote on Monday.
The landmark suspension is a victory for millions of environment campaigners concerned about dramatic declines in bees who were backed by experts at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). But it is a serious defeat for the chemical companies who make billions a year from the products and also UK ministers—who voted against the ban. Both had argued the ban will harm food production.
The vote by the 27 member states of the European Union to suspend the insect nerve agents was supported by 15 nations, but did not reach the required majority under EU voting rules. The hung vote hands the final decision to the European commission (EC) who will implement the ban. “It’s done,” said an EC source.
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Dogs in the swamp
Brown Dog, Yellow Dog,
John S. Quarterman, Gretchen Quarterman,
Video by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 21 April 2013.
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Dust and burrow:
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 24 April 2013.
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Bartram Trail wrote about the effect of William Bartram’s Travels on the English Romantics:
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Moreover, Bartram was describing not merely the New World, but one of its most exotic regions, the subtropical forests, rivers, and savannas that were so unlike the tame English countryside, even in the Lake district. Bartram’s America was inhabited by tribes of Indians, whom the English writers saw as “natural men,” the survivors of an ancient civilization, now lying in mysterious ruins, which also suggested many poetical and imaginative associations.
Coleridge read Bartram’s Travels carefully, wrote thoughts and extracts from them in his notebooks, and later withdrew images and
stories for his poems. Bartram’s influence is quite evident in several major works of the period: This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Osorio, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christobel, Frost at Midnight, Lewti and Kubla Khan.(116) Perhaps most strikingly, Coleridge later used Bartram in The Biographia Literaria to describe the poetic imagination. A passage in the Travels describes the stratified relationship between rocks, clay, soil, and the trees growing at the surface; to Coleridge, this seemed “a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth’s intellect and genius.”(117)
Wordsworth was also
