Milestones

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We’re Still Here

A downed tree blocks the footbridge

Last week’s derecho left a few downed trees over the trails here on the Quarry, but they’ll be clear by the time the Defiance County Junior Master Gardeners’ visit on July 11.

The big impediment to the clearing progress has been and still is the heat. Still no power, which means no blog, no running water nor AC and ice water for the our small clean-up crew. Blessings be on our neighbors for offering the use of their hand pump so the farm animals can be fresh-watered. The wading pool wasn’t filled fast enough for Beatrice the pygmy pot-bellied pig, though. Her Royal Porcine Highness did her best last evening to have a lie-down in the dogs’ water bowl.

If you’re out this way and have a cool, powered home with shower to return to, stop by for a nice game of pick-up-sticks along the paths. There could be a cookie or two in it for you at the cabin.

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An Eighth Direction

Preparing shelter house pad

The shelter house project at Red Fox Cabin is underway. A crew from Hovest Construction broke ground on Tuesday, clearing and leveling ground between the posts of the compass garden for 24’ x 24’ concrete pad. The crew finished and sealed the pad on Wednesday and cleaned and leveled the work site this morning. By August, this pad should support a 20’ x 20’ shelter house, the site of many future meetings, presentations and gatherings of all sorts on the Quarry Farm.

For anyone helping to raise the shelter house, there will be food. That includes observers.

Dooryard Garden Club at Red Fox Cabin’s zelkova

Members of the Putnam County Dooryard Garden Club visited right after Hovest Construction packed up their Bobcat. The group inspected the new project before touring the cabin, walking the Cranberry Run Trail, and meeting Educational Ambassadors Buddy the miniature donkey and Beatrice the pygmy potbellied pig.

 

Back up! What is a compass garden?

As the official name states, the Quarry Farm includes a nature preserve and a conservation farm. Red Fox Cabin and the gardens that surround it are part of both designations. One of the original gardens developed by Gerald and Laura Coburn was the compass garden. This garden is engineered according to the European navigational instrument that measures directions in a frame of reference that is stationary relative to the surface of the earth. However, the Red Fox Cabin compass garden was also designed in homage to the Coburn clan’s Native American heritage, primarily with traceable roots to the Cherokee Nation.

The Cherokee honor seven sacred directions to encompass a fully-dimensional world rather than one of singular dimension. In addition to the four singular dimension directions (east, north, west and south), there are: up (above), down (below) and center (which is where you are). Each direction is also associated with a season and a color:

  • NORTH is the keeper of winter, the season of survival and waiting. The North is associated with the color blue and the path of quiet.
  • SOUTH is the keeper of summer, the season of warmth. The South is associated with the color white, representing peace, happiness, and serenity.
  • EAST is the keeper of spring, the re-awakening of Mother Earth after a long sleep. The East is associated with the color red and represents victory, power, and war.
  • WEST is the keeper of autumn, the season of death and where it is hidden. The West is associated with the color black.
  • ABOVE is associated with the color yellow and represents peace.
  • CENTER is associated with the color green and represents the here and now.
  • BELOW is associated with orange/brown which represents the chaos and turmoil of the ever-changing Earth.

Note that I speak of the compass garden in the past tense. Invasive plants overran most of the directional plantings. Recently, the Quarry Farm board decided a permanent structure was needed to shelter visiting groups requiring seated onsite presentations since Red Fox Cabin can only hold a limited number of people at a time. The compass garden ground was deemed the most convenient location for such a shelter. The spot also sits just above the old stone quarry-turned-wetland, offering cool summer breezes and good views of butterflies, migratory birds and native trees.

So maybe some of the visual symbols of the old compass garden are missing, but the fully-directional world of the Quarry Farm is still growing. The house wren that is nesting in the apple gourd even stood her ground next to the construction site. She was back at her post this morning, scolding all visitors from her high tower in the zelkova tree.

Find out more about the Cherokee Nation, past, present and future, folklore and tradition, at
http://www.cherokee.org/Default.aspx.

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Happy Trails

Carrying tussie mussies

Although the air is hot and dry and the fields are gasping, this same daytime heat and cool nights kept the mosquitoes at bay long enough for Ottawa Elementary third grade to spend some time on The Quarry Farm before summer vacation begins. Teachers Kelly Nienberg and Vicki Otto blazed the trail for what we hope will be many field visits by local schools.

We only had this group for an hour and a half, but while they were here they made fresh, fragrant tussie mussies of mints, lavender, rose and oregano. Also called nosegays or posies, tussie mussies are small bunches of flowers or aromatic herbs that have been given as gifts since Medieval times. ‘Nosegay’ is probably the best label, because they likely gave the recipient something to bury their nose in to hide the fact that the giver (and themselves) didn’t bathe very often.

Posing on the porch of Red Fox Cabin

After tussie mussies were stored for the bus ride back to school, kids, teachers and chaperones walked down the hill and up the hill along floodplain streambank, meeting Nigerian dwarf goats Marsh and S’more and Buddy the donkey along the path as the trio worked their day jobs eating invasive plant species. They watched and heard bullfrogs, leopard frogs and Blanchard’s cricket frogs (unless the frogs saw them first) and sampled wild strawberries.

Mama Woodduck

Some caught a glimpse of a mother woodduck as she fled the scene. They saw the difference between poison ivy and Virginia creeper. They learned that nature provides a cure for many of its thorns, like sowing anti-itch, astringent jewelweed right next to poison ivy.

Cookies and lemonade cooled all hikers as they gathered off the porch of Red Fox Cabin. Some bundled fresh garlic from the cabin gardens to take home. Someone even snacked on a garlic bulb (we know because we found it, bite out and all.) Before boarding their bus, the students presented a donation to help support The Quarry Farm. We hope they come back and see what comes of their good works.

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A Mother’s Love

Two weeks ago, we received a call from an acquaintance on the east side of Findlay, Ohio. He’d found a female opossum at the side of the road near his home and she was still nursing a litter of babies. When we arrived, he led us to his old horse barn where he’d stashed mother and babies. The mother appeared to have been rolled by a car; she bore a series of scrapes and small lacerations and was favoring her right front leg. The little ones had their eyes open and were covered in a fuzz of short hair. We bundled her into a carrier and brought her home, called Nature’s Nursery Center for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation Education to let them know we’d picked up the family and set them up in a hutch just off our north deck.

Over the ensuing two weeks, we fed her a combination of dried cat food, soft cat food, apples, peaches, corn and duck eggs. Lots and lots of duck eggs. Once she began restlessly moving around the hutch, we decided it was time to cut her loose. Last night, we opened the hutch door and walked away, went about the business of entertaining ourselves on a Friday evening. Before calling it a night, we checked to see if they had indeed left, or if the amenities of the hutch were too much to take for granted. I was more than a little suprised to find the mother opossum gone, but her little ones still huddled in a corner of the hutch on the blanket we’d provided as bedding. We caught a glimpse of the adult as she moved away and into the tall grass in the bottomland below our house.

I was shocked. While the young opossums had grown considerably during their time here, they were still nowhere near ready to go it on their own. We waited by the door and watched to see if she’d return. She didn’t. Finally, too tired to maintain a vigil any longer, we shut the hutch door, locking the nine babies inside, and went to bed, disappointed and confused and more than a little heartsick.

This morning, a quick glance out the door showed the babies scrambling over the wire mesh of the hutch door. On the deck just outside the hutch and trying to figure out how to open the door was the mother. She barely reacted when I stepped onto the deck and still didn’t as I walked to the hutch, reached over her and pulled the pin that keeps the hutch door closed. The little ones scrambled out and found perches on their mother, who, after all of her little ones had climbed aboard, turned and, lumbering under their weight, climbed down off the deck and away.

I can only guess at what drove her off to begin with; there’s no shortage of nocturnal predators here. But I can say with certainty what brought her back. Call it instinct, if it suits you. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

From The Quarry Farm to all mothers, thank you for your love, sacrifice and determination. Happy Mothers Day.

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A Brand New Intimidation

For those of you unfamiliar with The Quarry Farm, we’re a small, nonprofit conservation farm and nature preserve located in Riley Township, Putnam County, Ohio, just about halfway between the villages of Ottawa and Pandora. It’s a family operation, as are most undertakings in this little corner of the state. Taking this whole adventure one step further, we’ve decided to start blogging; it seemed the likeliest avenue down which we should optimistically skip. In theory, at least. In fact? Well, that remains to be seen.

As this whole concept ultimately gelled, for me at least, around a small flock of reddish chickens … this, then, and I’ll bow out (for the moment):

red and purple sky
horned owls stir in cottonwoods
in the coop, silence