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
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
No rattles, didn’t coil, seemed like a harmless little oak snake.
No bigger than from the O to the A in GOODYEAR (less than two feet long). Continue reading
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.
-jsq
Also rosemary, collard seeds…. A bit muggy, you can tell by the foggy picture Gretchen just took at the historic Lowndes County Courthouse in downtown Valdosta, Georgia.
-jsq
Because Genetically modified crops risk widespread ruin, they should not be permitted without far greater scientific knowledge, for which the burden of proof falls on those proposing GMOs, not those opposing, say experts in risk and ruin.
Risk management or mitigation may work for localized harm,
but GMOs risk widespread systemic damage, which is ruin, and to prevent that
the precautionary principal is needed:
if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (such as general health or the environment), and in the absence of scientific near-certainty about the safety of the action, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing the action.
A paper by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and co-authors lays out Continue reading
How to grow your own vegetables for food and/or profit,
according to UGA Griffin, at the end of this month.
You can register by printing and mailing the
PDF form, or through the event
website. -jsq
University of Georgia Horticulture Presents:
Vegetable Growers WorkshopThis program will cover many aspects of how to grow your own Continue reading
Research, including studies presented at the conference in Istanbul, is showing that organic agriculture can deliver reliably high yields ”and that organic fields thrive in the face of disaster and duress, where chemical-reliant crops falter. Organic fields, for example, fare significantly better than chemically managed ones in the face of extreme weather, such as droughts or floods.
Anna Lappe, for takepart, 4 November 2014, Yes, Organic Farming Can Feed the World, Continue reading
This sums up both
Bill Gates’ sudden surge of
agricultural land purchases
and
the fossil fuel industry’s sudden surge of fracked methane pipelines:
“on a global scale, that the global problem, from the
perspective of European colonialists and European entrepreneurs, is
really how to transform the countryside.”
In both cases, we here in the southeast are just peasants
or backwards natives from the perspectives of the
the new colonialists as they try to transform our countryside.
So what if such transformation results in
dust storms
or
leaks, explosions, or
higher domestic natural gas prices?
The new colonialists would profit!
Jonathan Shaw wrote for Harvard Magazine November-December 2014, The New Histories: Scholars pursue sweeping new interpretations of the human past. Continue reading
Saying what many students think: “Students of all ages are thankful
that her appreciation of the plant kingdom and the world around her
touched them and made their lives.”
Jonathan Ertelt, Vanderbilt Magazine, Summer 2014 issue, Quarterman Was More Than a Biology Professor and Ecologist, Continue reading