Movie: Here we are in the okra field, the rainbow (40M):
Movie: Second rainbow is bright and getting brighter (42M):
Continue readingTag Archives: Silviculture
Rayonier, Altamaha, Georgia, 2012-09-08
It smelled as bad as it looked:
Picture by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 7 September 2012.
This is the notorious Rayonier paper mill near Jesup, Georgia,
that Georgia Water Coalition ranked on its Dirty Dozen,
2011’s worst offenses against Georgia’s Water,
as
#2, Altamaha River: Rayonier Pulp Mill Discharge Destroys Fisheries.
That report got
a reaction from Rayonier,
according to Mike Morrison in Jacksonville.com 8 November 2011,
Rayonier acknowledges waste issues,
The head of Rayonier acknowledged Monday that there are problems with the water it discharges into the Altamaha River at its paper mill near Jesup but said the company is ahead of schedule on cleaning it up.
The Georgia Water Coalition on Saturday ranked a stretch of river in the vicinity of the mill second on its “Dirty Dozen,” a list of the state’s most polluted or otherwise damaged rivers, streams, wetlands and marshes.
“We are very committed to the water quality of the Altamaha River,” Rayonier Chairman and CEO Lee Thomas said. “It’s important to us, just as it is important to the people of southeast Georgia. We’re working hard to improve the discharge.”
Rayonier’s pollution remains famous in song and story, such as in
this YouTube video.
Plan B to find a lost Android phone
How to find a lost phone in several miles of rough mowing?
After successfully examining the intelligence of a Colinus virginianus, Tractor Naturalist looked for more by mowing between the longleaf rows. The videoing phone liked those middles so much it stayed there. Or somewhere in several miles of mowing. How to find it?
Walking and looking amused the dogs, but didn’t find much. Walking and calling it at night in hopes it would light up didn’t find it, perhaps because we weren’t willing to stomp through the mowed rough in the dark.
So to google! Maybe there’s a way to make the phone tell you where it is? With most phones, you need to install an app before you lose it. But for Android phones, there’s Plan B, which you can install on your phone after you lose it.
So I did, and it started sending me email, saying it had located itself within 2415 meters, 
then within 96 meters, then 16 meters, then 6 meters (less than 20 feet). Each time it sent a map, the most recent of which is on the right here. That may look obscure to you, but to those of us who planted and weeded those rows, that green arrow is obviously six rows in and to me who just mowed, it’s right where I stopped mowing because I couldn’t see where I was going. Not bad, Plan B!
So we went with Gretchen’s phone to call mine. It rang! We tried again. She said,
It’s under my foot!
She reached down and held it up: phone found. Just like she finds rattlesnakes (but that’s another story).
I wasn’t thinking quickly enough to borrow her camera to catch her in the phone-finding act, but she took this picture of me and the dogs with the just-found phone:
Continue readingTroubled youth heal by healing troubled watersheds
We already knew nature makes healthy. Here’s a group helping nature help troubled youth make nature healthy.
From the website of Youth and Ecological Restoration Program:
Planting native trees and shrubs in local watersheds provides habitat and protection for fish, birds and many other species.
Stephen Hume wrote for the Vancouver Sun yesterday, Healing power of troubled waters: An ecological program that links at-risk teens with damaged watersheds has breathed new life into both,
Continue readingAfter Carnation Creek, Wendy applied and was accepted at university as a mature student, successfully studying ecology and land reclamation, presenting her own scientific papers. Then, eight years ago, she began putting her wisdom to work teaching the next generation to pay attention to the consequences of heedlessness, greed and ignorance about our dependence on the natural world.
Her innovative Youth and Ecological Restoration Program helps teenagers at risk. Some struggle with
Beautyberry as insect repellant
Beautyberry, Callicarpa americana, proven insect repellant!
Barbara Pleasant wrote for Mother Earth News April/May 2009, Beautyberry Banishes Bad Biting Bugs: Researches are finding evidence that beautyberry, long used as a folk remedy, really does deter bugs such as ants, ticks and others.
In 2006, researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural
Products Utilization Research Unit in Oxford, Miss., found that extracts from beautyberry leaves could match DEET for repelling mosquitoes. The next year, experiments showed that the active ingredients from the leaves (callicarpenal and intermedeol) provided 100-percent repellency of black-legged ticks for three hours. In 2008, the four-person research team, headed by chemist Charles Cantrell in Mississippi and entomologist Jerome Klun in Maryland, published research that added fire ants to the list of pests repelled by essential oil distilled from beautyberry leaves….
Fresh green leaves, crushed and rubbed on people or pets, often repel insects for a couple of hours.
Looks like Charles L. Cantrell of U. Miss. has published several papers about this:
Continue readingWoodpecker trees, Okra Paradise Farms, 29 June 2012
We had to take down one dead tree, but there are others for the woodpeckers. Well, people keeping telling me this oak is dead, but I say it's only been a few years, and it's going to sprout out again any time now:
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 29 June 2012.
Dead pine:
Continue readingProtracted 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 readingGroundwater at historically low levels
The only well in the Withlacoochee, Little, or Alapaha River watersheds that seems to be instrumented for near-realtime depth measurements is in Valdosta. That well is now at historic lows, compared to 55 years of back data.
On the
graph to the right, the black triangle in the middle of the green is the median over those 55 years since 1957. The green is 25th to 75th percentile. The yellow is 10th to 24th percentile. The red is below 10th percentile. I’m guessing below the red means never been seen that low before in that month.
The current depth shown, 137.52 feet below the surface on 26 April 2012, is not the lowest ever seen, which was 152.31 feet on 19 September 1990. But apparently it is lower than seen before for April.
Maybe we should think about water conservation more frequently than just when Valdosta’s water pumps have problems. Not just for watering lawns; also for agriculture and silviculture. Maybe we should try to plant crops that don’t require as much irrigation, or plant them in ways that don’t lead to so much evaporation. Maybe we should be more careful about clearcutting trees, which causes rapid runoff that doesn’t get back into the groundwater as much. Maybe we should think about how much growth do we want.
-jsq
Drying Out South Georgia Wetlands in Dirty Dozen by Georgia Water Coalition
We’re on Georgia Water Coalition’s Dirty Dozen 2011: as 9. South Georgia Wetlands: Four Decades of Ditches Dry Out South Georgia Wetlands:
Since the 1970s, state and federal regulatory agencies have allowed the destruction of more than 200,000 acres of highly critical wetlands throughout South Georgia to increase timber production and agricultural yields and usher in residential and commercial development. These wetlands that captured water and slowly released it to streams no longer perform that important function. The result has been increased floods when it rains and record low flows when it doesn’t….
Flooding? Like the 700 year flood in Lowndes County 3 years ago today?
What’s a wetland, anyway?
the greatest concentration of wetlands is in the Coastal Plain of South Georgia. Though these forested foodplains and wetlands may not seem directly linked to our rivers and streams, they play an important role in holding water during rain events and dispensing it during dry periods. The sponges and kidneys of our state, they mitigate major floods, lessen the impacts of drought, and clean the water that passes through them, while regulating the amount of freshwater entering Georgia’s coastal estuaries where commercially important seafood find critical habitat. Additionally, these wetlands provide important habitat for waterfowl and other wildlife.
So what’s the problem?
In an effort to convert these wild lands intoContinue reading
Reforestation for Profit
It seems that reforestation and land restoration
produces twice as many jobs as biomass and nine times as many as nuclear.
Nor does any of this have to adversely affect the Georgia lumber industry.
It’s well established that the currently popular method of clearcutting
isn’t the only way. Pine forests can be managed profitably
via selective logging;
here’s
more about that.
That permits the forest to remain a forest, with native vegetation, wildlife, hunting, recreation, flood control, etc., all for more forests than we have now.
Plus carbon sequestration credits.
Cotton farmers might like growing trees better under such economic conditions.
All this is shovel-ready for stimulus. There’s no new technolgy to develop for forest planting or management. Just implement carbon-sequestration credits for ongoing sustainability, and perhaps use stimulus funding to speed planting trees.