Recent Posts

Traditional Foods of the Piedmont: Ramps

Traditional Foods of the Piedmont: Ramps

Traditional Foods of the Piedmont: Ramps Allium tricoccum PLANT TYPE: Wild perennial PREFERRED SETTING: Understory of temperate hardwood forests from Canada to Georgia LIGHT: Direct sunlight in early spring SOIL TYPE: Rich, loose, moist soil high in organic matter...

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The Piedmont’s Next Chapter

The Piedmont’s Next Chapter

This is the last in a series of five blogs that explore the 10,000 year history of human relationship to the land in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.  Other blogs in this series include The Long Story of Catawba Run, Indigenous Cultures of the Piedmont, European...

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Land as Material: Harvesting Clay in the Piedmont

Land as Material: Harvesting Clay in the Piedmont

Rachel Brown hand coils a piece of pottery in 1908. Rachel Brown is one of the links in the ancestral chain keeping Catawba pottery alive for future generations of potters. Image Credit: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0Walking into a local North Carolina art gallery, a small clay...

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Industrialization Comes to the Piedmont

Industrialization Comes to the Piedmont

The stately White Oak is one of North Carolina's most familiar native trees,  grows in a wide variety of habitats and can live as much as 600 years. White oaks support more than 500 different kinds of moths and butterflies (much more than any other native plant) and...

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Honoring Our Agricultural Heritage on Indigenous Peoples Day

Honoring Our Agricultural Heritage on Indigenous Peoples Day

Winter squash, corn, and beans are three common foods that have a history reaching back more than 6,000 years in North America. It was the Indigenous peoples of the Americas that first cultivated these three crops - known as the Three Sisters - and discovered that...

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Ramping up Forest Regeneration with Drum Chop and Burn

Ramping up Forest Regeneration with Drum Chop and Burn

The regeneration of forests at Catawba Run continues this year with the latest drum chop and burn treatment on 30 acres.  The goal of the treatment was to clear away the dense thicket of stunted loblolly pine and other unmanaged regrowth of past clearcuts to make way...

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Native Foodways of the Piedmont

Native Foodways of the Piedmont

The forests of the Piedmont and nearby Blue Ridge Mountains provided a rich landscape in which to forage and farm when the first known humans to inhabit the North Carolina Piedmont arrived about 10,000 years ago.  Archeological evidence suggests that these...

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