Above: A member of RAM, a Haitian rock/vodou band that will play the West Kortright Centre this Saturday. Photo used with permission.
Last year it was bhangra. This year, it's Haitian mizik rasin music -- traditional vodou folk music mixed with rock 'n roll -- that is coming to the West Kortright Centre's lawn for its annual Gala Under the Stars.
The Meredith arts organization has booked the 14-member band RAM, a legend in Haiti, to play what promises to be a fantastic show. From the WKC's press release: Read more
The fate of borscht, the purple beet-based soup, seems inextricably tied to the fate of the Catskills. Both the soup and the region had their glory days in the 1950s, when the term "Borscht Belt" sounded glamorous, thanks to the massive Jewish resorts that attracted luminaries and beet-lovers alike upstate.
"Summer used to be borscht season," says Mr. Gold, chief executive of Gold Pure Food Products Co., based here. Several times a week, he recalls, "we would ship it in trailers—40- to 52-foot-trailers" each packed with 1,000 cases of bottled borscht headed to supermarkets.
In the 1950s, ads for the stuff featured a jar outfitted with a beret and sunglasses. "Be a Beet-Nik…Get Cool, Man!" Read more
The Daily Show's Jon Stewart took a swipe at the New York State Senate's priorities last week, when the senators -- still deadlocked over the pending same-sex marriage bill -- took time out of an extended session to vote sweet corn in as the official New York State vegetable. Read more
Photo of a fawn crossing a road in Delaware County last week by Jeremy Carden. Used with permission.
Last week, New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation released a draft of its new Deer Management plan, a new set of hunting guidelines for deer. The draft guidelines, which were hammered out based on suggestions made in a series of public meetings in 2009, make a few changes to current deer hunting rules.
According to a DEC press release, the biggest changes are recommendations to:
Include an index of deer impact on forests when setting deer population objectives;
Establish deer management focus areas with liberalized antlerless harvest rules in areas with overabundant deer;
Establish a special youth deer hunting weekend in early October for junior hunters to aid in the recruitment of new deer hunters;
Open the bowhunting season in the Southern Zone on October 1, rather than the current opening in mid-October; and
Continue the mandatory antler restriction program in wildlife management units (WMUs) 3C, 3H, 3J, and 3K, and expand antler restrictions to seven additional wildlife management units (WMUs 3A, 4G, 4O, 4P, 4R, 4S, and 4W) in southeastern New York.
The draft rules are meeting with some controversy. The proposals to establish a special youth hunting weekend, to make bowhunting season start earlier, and to tighten up restrictions on shooting young "spike-antlered" bucks are all prompting objections from some hunters, according to the Daily Mail: Read more
David Knudsen, the Sullivan County real estate broker who blogs at Sullivan County Real Estate CBA Blog, has noticed a new trend in the requests from his clients who are looking to by land upstate: They want to farm.
Or, Knudsen notes, they at least want to own a farm, perhaps because of the growing popularity of the local food movement:
This year there's a new trend, farms or farmettes. Right now my colleagues and I at CBA are working with about a half dozen clients looking for a place where they can "farm". That term is loose, but among these buyers it's more ambitious than just garden. (I'm also fielding another one or two calls a week from folks asking about farms.) These shoppers are typically looking for a place with 10, 20 or even more open, tillable acres that can be cultivated, as well as have space for raising animals like goats or chickens ... When I talk to some of these farm shoppers, I get the impression that they want to buy a farm so they can say they own a farm. Having your own farm upstate is probably the ultimate locavore status symbol, and has a lot more punch than just saying that you have a place upstate with a big garden.
Knudsen is a bit bemused about this new rage for farms among city-dwellers who don't have a clear idea of how back-breaking farming really is:
I spend quite a bit of time talking with these folks, particularly to balance the reality with the romance. The dream of having a farm is admirable, and the growing popularity of the locavore movement will only increase demand for locally produced products. But it's hard work, and even keeping up with a big garden is a huge challenge for weekenders.
But, he concludes, this could be a big opportunity for anyone with Catskills farmland who's willing to sell, particularly because there isn't as much farmland on the market in the Catskills as you'd expect.
Knudsen concludes his post with a link to an example of the kinds of buyers who are looking for farmland in the Catskills: A Brooklyn-based MeetUp group called "Create An Eden" that wants to form an "off-the-grid sustainable eco-village" devoted to permaculture. The group is planning to buy 100 acres of land somewhere in the Catskills region soon. From the group's webpage: Read more
Hats off to Daily Mail reporter Hilary Hawke, who had a ripping yarn in last Wednesday's paper about a swarm of more than 10,000 bees that moved into the walls of a second-floor apartment in Ravena: "Bees invade Westerlo Street home."
Hawke paints the scene in Technicolor:
Imagine sitting on your porch on one of the first warm days of spring after a brutal and prolonged winter, ready to kick back and enjoy the weather when suddenly an insistent buzzing like the sound of dozens of weedwackers shatters the quiet.
Thousands of tiny dark objects appear overhead, speckling the sky like bits of dirt hovering mid-air.
A huge writhing furry mass hangs suspended in a nearby tree.
Kids walking down the street stop, terrified to pass by the furious winged assailants. Read more
Ellen Verni has been writing "Home Cookin'," her column of Catskills recipes and rumination, for 24 years. She is sharing some of her archived columns with the Watershed Post. The column below first ran on Fathers' Day in 2001. (The above illustration, by Verni's husband Nick Verni, ran with it.) You can get more of Verni on her blog, at homecookincolumn.blogspot.com.
I’d like to start out with a disclaimer: That’s not my rule; that’s my husband’s rule. My husband, Nick, is continuing a long line of family traditions — his family, of course — of insisting on doing things in the traditional manner. By traditional, he means the way his father did it, and his father before him, back in the “old country.” Read more
Around 11:15am this morning, firefighters and firetrucks descended on the town of Andes in response to a report of smoke and electrical smells in the basement of 85 Main Street, which houses Apple Tree Realty and Woody's County Kitchen. No fire or smoke was visible around the structure when we got on the scene at 11:30, and the building appeared to be fine. The fire truck departed after about 45 minutes.
The Greenhorns themselves are a loose national network some 3,000 strong of "young farmers" (which the Greenhorns website defines, in all seriousness, as farmers "57 years old or fresher," since the average age of the American farmer is 57). They've been filming, producing and fundraising for the film for three years. Read more
Tay Home founder Nini Ordoubadi with a portrait of her aunt and inspiration, Noushafarin Saad. Photo provided by Nini Ordoubadi.
On the Saturday before Memorial Day, the Tay Home tea shop celebrated its grand reopening in a new location that has turned one of Andes' Main Street houses into a temple devoted to all things tea.
Over 100 people called on Nini Ordoubadi, Tay's owner and master tea blender, that night as she hosted a tea tasting at Tay Home's new home at 131 Main Street, directly across the street from the Andes Hotel.
There were several fragrant and tasty blends to sample, including "Saba," a lychee green tea that tantalized the senses with pear and floral aromas. The tea was served warm, but would also make a fantastic iced tea.
Another blend was "Berber" tea, also served warmed, which left a bold, lingering mint taste. But the star of the loose tea blends was Tay Home’s own "Better Than Sex" Rooibos blend. Served iced with a peppermint leaf, the aroma was reminiscent of chocolate chip mint ice-cream, and the taste did not disappoint. Read more
