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Continue readingTag Archives: Lowndes County
Overactive Beavers
This is what we’re trying to prevent by draining some beaver ponds:
Trees gnawed down by beavers.
Here Gretchen pans around the pond: Continue reading
Wild azaleas
Piedmont Azalea (Rhododendron canescens), native to the U.S. southeast. Often confused with honeysuckle, but that’s a vine from Japan, and this is a bush from here. These azaleas are growing in the woods in Lowndes County, Georgia.
A sky full of azaleas: Continue reading
Draining a Beaver Pond
We like beavers; they keep the water in our 12 acre pond.
But they’re getting a little too ambitious.
They’ve build another dam upstream, and they’re gnawing down trees.
So we decided to put a pipe through their dam to fool them
(this idea owed to David Fields).
This is an ordinary 4 inch perforated drain pipe, bought at North Lowndes Hardware. It needs to go through that dam I’m standing on. How do you do that? First remove a bunch of sticks (gloves are useful for this): Continue reading
Gretchen and Paige on WCTV about Quarterman Road
So we were riding our bicycles today, and Gretchen got a phone call from Carolyn saying WCTV (Channel 6, Tallahassee/Thomasville) was at her house and wanted an interview, but she was at work and couldn’t do it. Gretchen rode down there, and this is the result: Slowing Down Speeders, by Deneige Broom:
Quarterman Road in Hahira was paved within the last year.How did WCTV hear about this? They saw our neighbor Carolyn on YouTube: Continue readingSome people who live there say people drive faster than the posted 35 miles per hour limit.
The Georgia Department of Transportation says this type of paving is safe for up to 45 miles per hour.
Lowndes County agreed to lower the speed limit to 35 miles per hour after they heard concerns from residents.
Since GDOT says the 45 mile per hour is acceptable, a posted speed limit of 35 can’t be enforced without approval.
Residents just want something done.
“We had drag racers out here a few weeks ago, two corvettes speed racing side by side up and down the road,” said Gretchen Quarterman who lives on the road. “It’s a neighborhood, we have 30 families that live on this road, they have small children.”
Treat’s Rain Lily
You may know these as Easter lilies, or “those lilies that grow in the ditches by the road in the spring.”
It turns out their real name is Treat’s Rain Lily,
and they are a native of south Georgia and north Florida,
plus a bit of Alabama, and don’t grow anywhere else.
We’ve seen them in Georgia counties along the Florida border
as far west as Cairo, but not any farther north.
Here’s
much more about these lilies.
They really like where we burned this spring in the woods:
The red flags mark where we transplanted some longleaf pine seedlings.
Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, 2-3 April 2010, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Seedlings of One Longleaf
The red flags mark more than 120 seedlings sprouting from this one longleaf:
Here’s what they look like just after they come up:
It’s a pretty big tree: Continue reading
Red Buds
Spring is coming:
Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 28 February 2010.
Though a country be sundered, hills and rivers endure;
And spring comes green again to trees and grasses
Where petals have been shed like tears
And lonely birds have sung their grief.
…After the war-fires of three months,
One message from home is worth a ton of gold.
…I stroke my white hair. It has grown too thin
To hold the hairpins any more.—A Spring View, Tu Fu (c. 750), trans. Witter Bynner
Yellow dog at the creek
On a warm day in winter.
Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, Redeye Creek, Lowndes County, Georgia, 28 Feb 2010.
Sprouting Longleaf
Thousands of these all over the woods:
Many people think it takes fire to make longleaf produce seeds. These pictured seedlings came from a tree that hasn’t had fire near it for more than ten years. So why so many seedlings this year? Continue reading