Yes, there is one hill! Stick around afterward for the Seitz Family Applebutter Fest.
Public Events
cookies with Jam
In 363 days, the 2017 Quarry Farm Jam is happening under the red roof of the Seitz Pavilion. Two days after the 2016 musical gathering, my toes are still tapping and I wonder at the videos and photos that keep popping up on Facebook, including this compilation from Dave Frick:
A few years back, Steve brought up the idea of inviting musicians to this place, this “whole different world” as Betty Wannemacher says. No program, said Steve, just ask people to come on over and play their favorite musical instrument…or not. Listeners could pack a lawn chair. We’d supply the cookies, per tradition.
Four years ago, the first Quarry Farm Acoustic Night included guitar players and kazoos. The next year, fiddles and a saxophone showed up, too. The third year, scheduled for late October, was renamed a Jam as the pavilion was wired with electric outlets and lights. The weather didn’t care, however, as the Jam was snowed out (yes, snow.) The next day, we circled the second Saturday in 2016 as the fourth music night, plugged or unplugged.
Saturday’s instruments included guitars of various scale, a ukulele, autoharps, fiddles, harmonicas, and I believe that a mandolin made an appearance, too. There was a good gathering of music lovers to listen alongside and in the peaceable kingdom next door.
Oh so many thanks to Doug, Mike, Ralph, Gus, Dondi, Lynn, Bob, David and Michelle. And Erin, who has joined us every time with her roadie/soundman dad Bruce and musician mom Beth. Did you notice that great blue heron skimming low over the cabin on its way to sunset? That was your great-grandpa, Erin, and boy, is he proud.
Jam tonight
We’ll be jammin’ at 6 under the red roof. Bring a chair and jam, too. At least tap your toe and sing along.
The rain is moving through now and will leave us with cooler air, and there are cookies; always.
Color run
It took the dregs of July, the last real rain to percolate through the cracked ground, to get us through three weeks of no rain. A mustard haze hovered over the corn field across the road. Any bit of breeze brushed it into the water pans and left a brown coating on grass that was already crispy. Water in the cabin rainbarrel was conserved used sparingly.
In the floodplain, Cranberry Run didn’t run. Darters, minnows, crayfish and blue gill duked it out in pools, the survivors left to feed the great blue herons by day and raccoons by night.
A week ago, rain–rain we needed so very much–came and went, leaving fungi of all sorts sprouting and the rainbarrel full. The drought dried up the mosquito swarms, leaving perfect conditions for outdoor art workshops. There’s no better time to paint in watercolors than when water drips from the eaves of the shelterhouse, eh?
On August 20, we dug through the kitchen cupboard, the garden and its edges to pool a palette of natural pigments with which to paint still lifes and landscapes. The Saturday class includes individuals from right here in Putnam County to a Tennessee visitor. Using rich colors derived from paprika, turmeric, blueberries and poke berries (plus black coffee, something that’s part of every workshop here), participants developed pieces lush with late summer color. Store-bought paints were also available and most everyone washed the first layer of a second work.
There were visitors of different species, including an unidentified caterpillar and two haywagons-full of riders shuttled by neighbor Daryl Bridenbaugh. When paints were put away, the creative mood was still fresh. Board President Laura shared a slurry of shredded, soaked paper, mixed in some concrete plus a little dab of this and that so those that could stay onsite could make papercrete containers.
On this last day of August, one pot has traveled home to North Carolina while the others are still drying in Ohio. Instead of yellow dust, there is fog.
And it’s raining.
Return of the Finch’s
Brenda Fawcett mixes papercrete
Despite the heat, only one paint mixer drill bit and mosquitos aside, three programs happened onsite this past week. Monday, Putnam County Master Gardener Brenda Fawcett led a make-and-take wherein participants created planters out of papercrete (a sort of papier mache combination of Portland cement and paper strips.) Tuesday saw the return of the Hardin County Herb Society.
On Saturday, “the hottest day of the year” according to local weather forecasters, Charlene Finch and the 2016 Continental Jr. Gardeners made the group’s annual trek from the northwest corner of Putnam County. If you scroll back through this blog, you’ll see that Finch’s crew have been here just about this time every summer for several years. After partaking in a scavenger hunt for pollinators, the young green thumbs posed on the front porch of Red Fox Cabin for their annual portrait (thanks to Miranda for sharing this snap.) They also visited with the farm animal sanctuary residents, helping to cheer up S’more as he’s been pretty withdrawn due to the loss of his brother this week.
That pollinator search led to quite a list of creatures. The team of Nathan and his mom Lindsay won the scavenger hunt with a list of 21, as follows:
Nathan, Pollinator ID Champion
1. baby green grasshopper
2. people
3. wasps
4. cabbage moth
5. dragonfly
6. wood bee
7.big brown beetle
8. fly
9. bumblebee
10. flying ant
11. mosquito
12.ash bugs
13. sweat bee
14. black cricket
15. honey bee
16.black wasp
17. Japanese beetle
18. black beetle
19. big brown camo moth
20. gnat
21. red lightning bug with reddish brown black spots
Teams didn’t have to be specific with names as long as they could describe their finds. As a group, we corrected some names and identified others as described. For instance, #19 was a skipper butterfly.
You’ll also note that not all on the list are technically pollinators: hummingbirds, bats, bees, beetles, butterflies, and flies that carry pollen from one plant to another as they collect nectar. However, all of Saturday’s finds carry pollen, not to mention seeds and other insects, in their journey from place to place. That includes humans, whether we intend to or not.
You may also see that the notorious, voracious invader Japanese beetle made the list. They may spread pollen around as it clings to their scarab-like bodies, but they more than make up for this by decimating green goods. But there’s hope from the skies, control provided by a European transplant that’s been here so long that the New World is as much theirs as it is ours.
Eat up, European starlings. There’s ketchup in the shelterhouse.
A recap, with goat wrestling
Steve is wrestling with Mister Bill in the cool of the evening. This has become the routine this week after the temperatures fell out of the upper 80s and into the 60s by dusk. Bill scampers up the ramp and down the steps to mock charge. Steve holds the giant goat’s horns–lightly so as not to challenge–and Bill tosses his head and off he goes again on his gangly giraffe legs.
This playtime is to make-up for Bill’s banishment to Sophie’s corral during summer’s Family Day. The big lug likes to hug, but his horns are part of the mighty embrace. If you’re not familiar with his ways, a Mister Bill show of affection can be alarming and uncomfortable.
So one week ago today he watched from a distance as 70 some people came to visit, seeing a long-eared owl, kestrel, red-tailed hawk and turkey vulture from Black Swamp Raptor Rehab, a wild juvenile bald eagle overhead. Laura demonstrated how to make a cement-and-fiber pot. Bush honeysuckle was repurposed as hiking sticks and leaves were made lasting on t-shirts.
Mister Bill did meet a troop of Daisies the next day. The girls made hiking sticks in the pavilion as a brief but heavy rain thundered over its red roof. Lemonade and cookies later, they set forth on a trek along the stream to meet Bill, Buddy and everyone else who decided to come forward after the shower.
On the hike back, they saw a leopard frog along the creek, a tiny toad in the raingarden and three different dragonflies: a widow skimmer, a white tail, and at least two twelve spots in the pollinator garden. 
Look what came in the post
Picture yourself running at a clip along your favorite route, or walking, comfortably but at a pace brisk enough to get the blood moving aerobically through your veins.
And with each footfall you are supporting the educational programming, trail maintenance, invasive bush honeysuckle control and care and feeding of the farm animal sanctuary residents on The Quarry Farm Nature Preserve & Conservation Farm. The great blue heron medallion that swings across your chest/at your belt loop/from your rearview mirror reminds you of this.
The medals have arrived for The Quarry Farm 5K, with t-shirts just behind them. REGISTER NOW to run in your own space at your own pace or join us in person on October 1 in Northwest Ohio.
If you opt for the virtual event, please send in a photo of yourself wearing The Quarry Farm 5K t-shirt (and the medal, if you like) as you participate in your neck of the world. What a photo gallery that will be!
Among the pages, on tiptoe
As temperatures climbed and the sky turned hazy yellow from blowing topsoil, we anchored the canine hammock in the Forester. Sophie is joining us every day through Thursday this week at all eight branches of the Putnam County District Library.
The first stops were among the shelves at the main branch in Ottawa and the community room in Kalida. I should point out that Sophie was to visit with young patrons on the neat linoleum rectangle of floor off the French doors in Ottawa, but just try and tell a pot-bellied pig that he or she isn’t going to wander through the fiction section or the young adult reading room. I dare you. Luckily, we had a banana with which to entice her back to the party.
Back at the farm in the cool of the evening, Miracle Max came out to dance. If only Humperdink and Inigo had joined in, we could have filmed a quadrille.
Not one just like the other
Right now, as the sun sets on Saturday, Sophie is rooting grasses for a bed to sleep under the stars. In a week’s time, she seems to have developed a penchant for the outside rather than her nest inside her outbuilding. Her stint as visiting ambassador at Sauder Village, for porcine everywhere, and here on The Quarry Farm for two days of welcoming two schools from two counties, must have made this so.
As for me, my voice is gone, but the temporary loss is well spent on two full days of spring fields trips with over 170 people painting lasting leaf t-shirts, getting up close and personal with macroinvertebrates as water quality indicators, and meeting a six-spotted tiger beetle, pot-bellies, turkeys and Sophie herself.
Thursday morning, preschoolers and parents from the Pandora area hiked around the Red Fox gardens to select interesting leaves. With a little help from the adults, the children arranged dandelion, violet and burdock on their white shirts and spritzed paint around the greens. Several malfunctioning spray bottles later, there were some very colorful shirts, not a single one exactly like the one next to it.
Third graders from Chamberlin Hill Intermediate School in Findlay arrived on Friday in two shifts. The first 70-some got off the bus around 10 a.m., made their shirts (using all new spray bottles) and hung their finished wearable art in the bushes and trees before hiking down the hill, along Cranberry Run and splitting into two groups at the north gate. Half went through the gate to meet the farm animals, the other to see dragonflies, damselflies, crayfish and the amazing boneless swimming acrobatics of fish leeches.
Thanks to Zoe for showing everyone that fish leeches won’t suck human blood, even after 10 whole minutes.
With a lot of paint left in the bottles after the second bus drove away south on 7L, we tackled the north picnic table with splashes of red, purple, green, and blue. The other table remains for another visit and another day.
Sticky toes and hiking sticks
The drive home yesterday afternoon was a race against the weather. A thunderstorm rolled in from the west, heavy with rain, wind and lightning.
I lost the race. Anyone driving by saw two humans trimming honeysuckle trunks of branches and stems, all soaked and getting wetter by the moment. The geese weren’t bothered, but pigs, goats and donkeys watched the proceedings from under dry roofs. By 9:00 p.m., it was dark and we had 45 honeysuckle stems ready to become hiking sticks on Friday morning at the hands of the Pandora-Gilboa Elementary School’s Third Grade as taught by Mrs. Arthur and Mrs. Henry.
Gray tree frog, its sticky toes stuck five feet above the ground
An hour later, we were still damp but warm and ready for sleep. But a look out the kitchen window kept us up for another half hour. The steady rain had sent a ‘sticky toed’ gray tree frog climbing for higher ground. How can you not stay awake for that?
Twelve hours later, blue sky and a yellow school busload rolled in and stayed for the day. Presumably, the treefrog is back under the spring canopy.
