I moved

hummmm, had a bit o' trouble getting this one off the ground as BlogSpot was not happy with the Toshiba way or something like that. Anyway, I've moved from my little cottage in the woods in Tallahassee after 30 years of turning a large half-acre cow pasture into, well, the woods. Lots of native plants happily blooming away and lots of wildlife welcomed in the yard.

But Tallahassee was getting too darned big. So I moved south of town, near Woodville, to three acres of sand and an old house. The previous owners took good care of the house and mowed most of the yard often. They let many oaks grow up in the front so when you first see the place you think it ought to be called Oak Grove. Behind the house are where the pines are. Okay, they are planted pines and mostly slash but the ground was never bedded or trashed so many residual sandhill plants are popping up. The real reason I chose the name Pine Grove is because that is the little settlement where my grandma was born, neat Baxley, Georgia. Baxley was in the heart of longleaf / wiregrass country. Grandma's father was first a farmer but turned to the trees to make a living.

B.C. (Benjamin Collis) Williams moved his young family first to Alabama and by early 1900 they had followed the longleaf to Florida. B.C. ran turpentine stills and his brother, H.C. (Henry Caswell), was a woodsrider. B.C. died in 1913, still a young man, when some virgin longleaf forests remained. Still, I believe he had a hand for a few years in bringing the ecosystem to its knees. I'm sure he didn't see it that way; he was earning a living to support his wife and nine children.

My plan is to take the property back to its original state of longleaf, wiregrass, and other plants. I'm off to a pretty good start as there is a fair amount of wiregrass left and a few longleaf are mixed in with the slash pines. I'm making arrangements with a man who will do small acreage cuts. With luck he'll make enough to cover his expenses and time. I know the ground will be somewhat torn up. Well, yeah, a lot torn up. And I'll have a huge amount of pine limbs to deal with.