Welcome to ToTG!



May 22, 2014

Polk Salad Annie - Tony Joe White


4 comments:

Barb said...

That was great. I think he's channeling a little bit of Elvis and a lot of bb King

Mike said...

I remember when that song was popular; it's been covered by several other artists.

I have some pokeweed growing by the side of my garage, but have always been too scared to eat any of it since I've heard some of it's poisonous. Used to see a big bluejay back there eating the berries,but haven't in a while.

Barb said...

We have pokeweed growing everywhere on our property, the birds "deposit" the seeds. I am constantly chopping it off at ground level.
When I was doing research on poisonous plants for one of my classes I read that pokeweed is mildly poisonous and that the young leaves and later the berries are least dangerous but that in mature plants the roots, stems and leaves are dangerous. Another cool thing about this plant is that it contains a natural anti-viral compound.

Mike said...

After I wrote that, I went to read up on it and one interesting thing is that they've found out there's a toxin in the plant that's showing promise for controlling zebra mussels, an invasive species that's starting to take over many lakes and waterways here in Texas. I follow the Texas Parks page on Facebook and they've had quite a few posts about that here lately, esp. on the new law that requires boat owners to throughly clean their boats after being in the water.

I was looking at some real estate a few yrs. back at another great property w/ a lake and small ponds on it; the ponds look like they were kept full by pumps from a fairly large volume creek, then as I was researching the area "in case I hit the lottery" I found out the creek basically came from Lake Texhoma (the Red River), one of the first places that had an infestation of those mussels and that they had been found in Lake Levon, which was what that creek fed. I can just imagine that the place was for sale b/c they had got those mussels in their ponds and lake...which would make them nearly worthless.

I've seen pictures of boat propellers and dam structures completely covered w/ those things, really scary. It's like fire ants, killer bees and those damn Asian carp.

I know one thing, if I ever DID have a place w/ a significantly sized lake on it, I wouldn't let anyone put a boat on it, and if I put NEW boats on it, they'd never come off it, esp. to go somewhere else.

So many places in the world that just can't handle the importation of other species...Australia w/ the rabbits, Hawaii w/ rats and other animals, etc.