News from the Past in Memory of Harry A. Sturges

By Bob Beyfuss

For Capital Region Independent Media

Last week I wrote about some of the disasters I had with my 2022 vegetable garden, mostly due to my own fault, but some also due to the unprecedented hot and dry weather parts of our region experienced. 

I forgot to mention another blunder, which was hooking up a soaker hose to my 250-gallon rainwater storage tank and then forgetting to close the valve overnight. Soaker hoses are great tools to apply water slowly over a period of hours, but leaving them on for 24 hours or so is not a good idea. In my case I lost most of my stored rainwater before I realized I had left it running!

On the plus side, my 20-year-old asparagus patch of “Jersey Knight” once again performed beautifully and I feasted on fresh asparagus from early May until the Fourth of July. The flavor is excellent, and this variety is resistant to rust, crown rot and fusarium. It also performs well in my heavy, clay soil.

This is an all-male variety that does not produce any female spears, which can be distinguished from the male shoots by the round, red berries the females produce. The advantage of this trait is that the plant does not expend any stored energy trying to ripen seed. The downside is that no new seedlings are produced, so no replacement plants can be established.

I use table salt to reduce weeds, which may also help prevent crown rot, since asparagus is remarkably tolerant of salt while many annual weeds are not! Only well-established beds, at least three years old, should be “salted” at a rate of about 2 pounds of rock salt per 100 square feet. I apply it in late spring, as many annual weeds are germinating.  

Backyard asparagus is pretty much pest-free, except for occasionally being damaged by Japanese beetles and asparagus beetles, which are easily controlled by spraying an insecticide after the harvest season, or hand picking them as you are harvesting early in the season. My local deer seem to ignore them and even chipmunks, rabbits and woodchucks usually avoid them.  

Here are some tips for growing asparagus. First, allow no weeds to compete. This is accomplished by diligent hand weeding early in the season, salting and applying a heavy mulch over the winter. My preferred winter mulch is sugar maple leaves, which are often available free at curbsides where many people bag them up for pick up by the town or village. I hope to go leaf stealing this weekend if I get the chance.

Avoid using oak or beech leaves, as they tend to mat and do not break down as sugar maple leaves do. I will use as much as a 10-inch layer of sugar maple leaves now, which breaks down to 3 inches or so by next summer. Asparagus is also a pretty heavy feeder, so I added a 50-pound bag of rabbit manure to the bed last week.

I tried a new onion variety this year called “Candy,” which also suffered from the drought, as well very uneven growth. I got some really large onions, but most were stunted and small. Next year I will go back to “Sweet Sandwich.” My leeks did well and they are the only remaining crop left to harvest, as I finish cleaning up my garden.

On June 3, I planted seven seeds each, of four different bush-bean varieties: Roma (a flat podded, Italian variety), Golden Butterwax (yellow pods), Royal Burgundy (purple pods) and Earli-Blue (green pods). All performed very well and matured within a few days of each other, with the best-tasting, in my opinion, being Golden Butterwax. This yellow variety is also the earliest and most prolific, followed by Royal Burgundy. I did not care as much for Roma or the green variety.

One 10-foot row of beans produces far more than I can eat! My “Detroit Dark Red” beets and multicolored (rainbow) carrots, also planted on June 3, also did pretty well, despite the drought.    

Finally, I must thank my friends and especially my neighbor, Sally, who gave me some very late transplants of winter squash that did reasonably well. I will be bringing some butternut and spaghetti squash with me to Florida!

Sally gave me an “heirloom” (unnamed) paste-type tomato that, despite being transplanted in late July, produced an excellent crop of the largest, meatiest canning-type tomatoes I have ever seen! I harvested more than a dozen hard, very green fruit in early October. I put them in a paper bag with an apple and within three days, these green tomatoes turned red and they tasted wonderful!

I will save seed from one of these fruit for next year’s garden!

By Mary Lou Nahas

For Capital Region Independent Media

The hamlet of Durham, or Durham village as it was once called, is a special place.

According to the “History of Greene County,” the first settler in what is now Durham village was Adijah Dewey. He was called Major Dewey and built a log home that is said to have been the first hotel here.

Dr. William Cook was the first physician.  He was a soldier in the Revolution and with Washington at Morristown, New Jersey, in the winter of 1777. It is said that a man by the name of Ford had the first cabinetmaker’s shop. Polly Chittenden taught school during 1787 and 1788 and Elizabeth Dudley in 1789. A Mr. Carter was the first lawyer, while Jacob Carter built the first bridge over the Katskill and another at Brown’s Mills. The Presbyterian church was organized Nov. 8, 1792.

Oriana Atkinson, wife of New York Times drama critic Bruce Atkinson, wrote quite a lot about Durham: “We found out that Durham was an old little town and had changed but slightly since it was settled about 1784 by people from Connecticut. 

“It was through William Chittenden that Durham, New York, came to be born. His ancestor Jairus, at the age of 42, father of seven children, with a wife already middle-aged, decided to follow the trend out of Connecticut. 

“It was becoming known that a great new road was going to be hacked out of the Western Wilderness for the use of people who were already thinking of Ohio and beyond. Jairus decided he would combine business with pleasure and buy land along the route of the new road and also build a home on some of the acres. 

“In 1787, Jairus came alone to Durham. It was only a tiny cluster of houses but even that was too crowded for him. He climbed the Hill late called Prink Hill, and about a half mile above the town took up a tract of about 400 acres, most of it along the probable route of the new Road. He hired labor to build a solid story and a half house and a great barn across the road from the house.”

Today that house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

According to Alf Evers in “The Catskills from Wilderness to Woodstock,” when President Timothy Dwight of Yale revisited the Hudson Valley in 1804 and 1815, he found the houses “ordinary and ill-repaired,” the roads were “disagreeable” and the inhabitants lounging at taverns, “rude in their appearance and clownish in their manners.”

But when the president reached Durham, where a New England settlement had been made, everything changed. He found the land “thoroughly cleared, well-cultivated, and divided by good enclosures into beautiful farms. Indeed, everything here wears the appearance of prosperity.” 

A 1906 Durham column in the Oak Hill Record gives a feeling of the activity in the village then:

• Two autos passed through this village on Saturday last.
• Bradley Bunce was recently bitten in the arm by a horse owned by Sidney Crandall. Dr. Conkling dressed the wound.
• The gypsies have arrived, several wagons passed through here last Sunday.
• We are sorry to say Mr. E. Lawrence lost his horse after a sickness of a week.
• Mrs. Myers is having the front of her home much improved under the skillful hand of carpenter F. Delamater.
• Prof. Dunham reports a big fish catch of 30 trout.

Thelma Bell, whose family came from downstate and stayed, remembered in “A Lifetime of Memories”: “When we were summer residents in West Durham, we would come down to the village for ice cream socials held by the ladies of the church. They took place on the lawn, next to Reynold’s General Store. The ice cream makers would be lined up and everyone got a chance to turn the handle, making the container of cream spin around in the surround crushed ice and salt. When it was done, oh what a thrill to eat that cold, homemade ice cream! The tables and chairs were set up with cakes and cookies fresh from the neighbors’ kitchens to go with the ice cream. “

In an unpublished account titled “Homes in the Village of Durham,” Frederick Hull describes the town he remembered: “The big house on the corner was owned by the Williams girls — sisters — 2 old ladies in the early 1900s. The estate sold it to Mary Hulsen and her husband, Fritz. They ran a boarding house there — small one but thriving. About 1950’s Ernest and Ruth Hill Hull sold their farm and bought this property and called it the Ox Bow Inn. They kept hunters and summer boarders until 1972. Ernest worked in Bell’s Store and Schmollinger’s in Freehold in the kitchen. They sold it in 1972 to Kathy and George Kuhn who have 9 children, a pair of twins, Jared and Melissa, born after they moved here from the city. The older children are Christopher, Veronica, William, Jennifer, Erik, Jaime and Andrew. Kathy is an R.N. who works in Hudson some and George runs a garage there in 1980.”

These are just a few of stories about this special part of Oak Hill and Vicinity. If you drive though today you will notice several houses being redone, the Methodist church  got a new roof, and a number of places are for sale. 

This is one of those special places that hopefully is coming alive again.