Monthly Archives: June 2017

Catskills Weekend: July 1st

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Saturday July 1st

Celebrate

9.30 to 4pm in Roxbury, their Summer Festival on Main Street including a Pop-Up Art Sale in the Orphic Gallery, street art, pony rides, wine tastings, fly fishing demonstrations, food, antiques and much more.

Learn

10am at the Catskill Center in Arkville: Stone Pigment Workshop. Catskill mountain artist Laura Leigh Lanchantin will demonstrate her method of grinding Catskill sedimentary rock into oil and watercolor paint. No previous knowledge is required. $12 per person at Catskill Center, 4355 State Route 28, Arkville, New York 12406.

1pm at Woodchuck Lodge in Roxbury: Mairead Mulhern will give a talk on Wildlife Near Home. Mairead, an Environmental Educator from Mine Kill and Mac V. Shaul State Parks, will discuss local wildlife found in Upstate New York. Come take a look at various pelts, skulls, and feathers that are from local animals found in your county. This is a family friendly event. All ages welcome. Address: 1633 Burroughs Memorial Road, Roxbury, NY 12474.

Eat

9am to 4pm: Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Pop Up Shop, in the lot at Phoenicia Diner at 5681 Route 28, Phoenicia, NY 12464. July 1st to 4th. Live music by M. Lui and Keenan O’Meara on Saturday night.

Dance

It’s hard to resist a dance party when it comes along. Wayside Cider is having such a shindig on July 1st, 7pm to 11pm, at their brewery in Andes. 55 Redden Lane, Andes, NY 13731. DJ Jess will be spinning.

Tick Tubes

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Widely available from Amazon and other places, these tick tubes (pictured above) are stuffed with cotton wool that is laced with the insecticide Permethrin. Hide them around the yard at no less than 10 yard intervals and the cotton inside the tube will be stolen by mice who will use it to build their nests. It’s been reported widely that white-footed mice are the main vectors for Lyme Disease and these mice typically live very close to, or in, the home in addition to on the edge of forests. Put as many as these tubes out around your home as you can, once in Spring and once in the Summer. The permethrin will kill the ticks but not the mice. They appear to work, but it’s not clear from our experiment whether they are being taken by chipmunks or mice.

Over the winter, it was crystal clear that either mice or chipmunks were sleeping or nesting in our wood piles. Each log was covered in mouse (or chipmunk) droppings.

You can also make your own tick tubes, by saving the toilet or paper towel tube and stuffing it with your own permethrin-laced cotton balls. However, permethrin is notoriously toxic, so I haven’t been brave enough to try that yet. If you are getting bitten while gardening, you can spray your gardening boots with Permethrin as small nymph ticks are rampant this year and they are so small they can hitch a ride on your shoes into your house.

Daily Catskills: 06/27/17

After a wet, gloomy morning, 67F by mid-afternoon and mostly sunny. Huge, thundering clouds quickly rolling through stealing the scene, cracking lightning and later issuing some torrential, late afternoon rain. Moody.

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Catskills Weekend: 48 Hours in Arkville

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If you’re a urbanite, you might have found yourself many times under the bright, hot lights of a NYC clothing store listening to the excruciatingly loud, banging electronic music and found yourself getting more and more agitated while trying to shop. I was happy to leave that part of city life behind and gave up shopping in stores long before I left the city.

I was reminded of this last week, when I found Just Shop Boutique, in Arkville, a discount clothing store with labels to love: Clare V, Laveer, Thakoon, rompers, suits, and much more for low prices, all in a calm, country setting.  I had planned to order some shirts online, but saw the red, tartan shirt in the Just Shop window and was lured in. I spent hours ferreting around in there with my mother-in-law, grabbing stuff and then putting it back. Then grabbing stuff and then putting it back. I was very restrained, but wanted to buy all of it. To get an idea of how excited I was, know that I bought a wool, stars-and-stripes poncho for my English sister-in-law ($28). I also bought a traditional, Turkish bath towel, that you can use for camping or a scarf (versatile), for $45. This is an item that I’ll own for life. (The red shirt didn’t fit.)

Plus, just across the road, there are both booze and sandwiches. A few seconds up the road, there’s the flea market, at which my family members religiously stop on their way home from my house to find cute stuff like a crystal serving bowls for a reasonable price. Suddenly, Arkville is a place where you can drink martinis and find a Thakoon striped shirt, overlaid with lace tank top. Score! While I was browsing a week or two ago, in came a woman shopping for a dress to wear to a local wedding because her dress was slit to the waist and kept blowing over her head. Right on, sister.

So, if you’re looking for a whistle-stop tour, a city girls’ weekend outing, or you’re a local with guests to entertain, here’s my plan for your 48 hours in Arkville. A tiny village with a great deal to see.

Eat

© J.N. Urbanski Arkville Bread & Breakfast Fish and Chips

Arkville Bread Breakfast (or “Jack’s Place”), is located in a blue and red converted train caboose. You can’t miss it and it does the best fish and chips. Although that dish appears rarely, they still stock all the English condiments and a wide selection of beverages. Jack’s does hearty, comfort sandwiches, like the brisket sandwich, which is delicious. They have plenty of vegetarian options. Laurie makes her own hummus and the veggie-hummus wrap is delicious. I also love their bean burger wrap.

Up the hill towards NYC is Oakley’s Bar & Grill, a local favorite for pizza, wings and burgers. Try the white pie, with spinach. There’s also Maine Black Bear Seafood Restaurant ((845-586-4004), a rustic fish restaurant on the Dry Brook River at the intersection of Route 28 and Dry Brook Road. The owner drives up the east coast every week for fresh fish. Well, he used to last time I checked. Call him. Continue reading

Farm to Belly: Garlic Scape Pesto

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It’s garlic scape season! A scape is the bud of the spring garlic bloom that has yet to flower. We cut off these very long buds in order to encourage the plant to focus on growing the actual garlic bulb that grows in the ground. In the picture at the bottom of the page, you’ll see the garlic growing in the ground and there’s a long leaf with a light colored bud on it that has curled over and is pointing left. This is the scape before it’s cut off. Continue reading

Bill Birns at The 2nd Annual Book Fair at the CIC

Image: Mountain Arts Media, courtesy of Bill Birns

On Saturday June 24th at 1.30pm the Catskill Interpretive Center in Mount Tremper, Bill Birns will be speaking at the 2nd Annual Book Fair.

Bill will be reciting his epic poem Fleischmanns, a Poem (an Historical Imaginative Projection) that was published in three parts here on Upstate Dispatch. (Find Part 1 published here, Part 2: here and Part three: here.) Come and listen to Bill read his richly descriptive, poetic rendering of local history. Bill is a superb orator and listeners will be in for a treat.

Address: Maurice D Hinchey Catskill Interpretive Center, 5096 Route 28, Mount Tremper, NY 12457.

Daily Catskills: 06/19/17

Humid and sticky with periods of torrential rain, thunder and flooding throughout the day and throughout the mountains, caused by dense, milky, blue-hued clouds.

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Daily Catskills: 06/18/17

86F by mid-afternoon, hot and very humid with periods of sunshine through a veil of cloud, rain showers and a warm breeze. Sunset in the forest.

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Catskills Conversations: Julia Reischel

© Joe Damone

Julia Reischel is a co-founder of the Watershed Post and resident of Margaretville.

JNU: What brought you to the Catskills?

JR: I came here because of my family. I’m not from here. I like to describe myself as a carpet-bagger [laughs]. Lissa, my wife, grew up here and has about six generations of family in the Margaretville area. When I started dating her in Boston, I knew pretty much immediately that I was going to end up here if I stuck with her, because she has this magnetic pull to this area. All her potential stories ended here. So the Catskills were in my future and when we got married we moved here. We started the Watershed Post, our now defunct news site that we ran for seven years.

Is The Watershed Post still up?

It’s up, but just not being updated. We’ll keep it up as a sort of archive and honestly, it’s Lissa’s call on that because I formally quit a while ago. [Laughs]

Did you have a contract with her? [Laughs]

We actually do have a contract in place.

That’s very sensible! 

[Laughs] If we were going to have some sort of acrimonious split, one of us would have to buy out the other. What actually happened was that I decided to give her de facto control over it in exchange for not doing anything for it anymore. So I’m still technically part owner. She ran it by herself for a couple of months and came to the same conclusion that I did, which was that there’s no money in journalism. Continue reading

Catskills Sandwich: The Goods Filet

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If you’re looking for a scrumptious fish sandwich, and you’re around Boiceville, look no further than The Goods Luncheonette, where you’ll find a snappy fish filet with creamy, tangy sauce, plus a dollop of coleslaw, in a soft, brioche bun.

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Rhubarb

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Years ago, when we were losing our crops to blight and other things, our neighbor Alan White, told us to find out what grows well on our ridge and plant a lot of it, then swap for other produce you might need with neighbors. Rhubarb loves it here, as do potatoes, asparagus, garlic, asparagus and berries. This year, my husband is trying arugula, because I spend money on that stuff and it’s imported from god knows where. That’s not to say that I don’t eat our weeds like sheep sorrel and dandelion, because I do. Our mint has also gone quite rogue and I’m picking new growth in our lawn along with the other weeds.

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