Erik Assadourian leads a weekly forest meditation at a local Middletown park (often but not always Wadsworth Falls). Meditating in the forest (sometimes called Forest Bathing or Shinrin Yoku) is a good way to quiet the mind and connect more deeply with the natural world. The small (socially-distanced) group learns the basics of the meditation (the style varies each week) and then finds a spot in the park to meditate. Afterwards participants come back together to sit quietly, reflecting on the experience if so moved. The entire practice is about 45-60 minutes and then we invite participants to stay for tea and cookies. The next meditation will be on the top of Indian Hill at Indian Hill Cemetery at 3pm on 10/25. We’ll do a corpse meditation as it’s almost Halloween! For the full calendar, weekly details, and map of the specific locations, visit here.
Thanks to the generous donors to our Replace Our Trees Campaign, the Jonah Center is planting 22 street trees around the Middlesex YMCA (red maples, dogwoods, hawthorns and lindens), and along William Street and Church Street, north and south of the Traverse Square apartments (red maples, ginkgoes, and ornamental cherries), where the Middletown Housing Authority is contributing to the cost of the new plantings.
It is that time in the season when you may have more cucumbers and zucchini then you can eat or put up. If you find yourself in this situation, consider donating your excess produce to our local food pantries and put it to good use. Details for Middletown and Portland are below:
For the past 4 years, the Jonah Center has organized work parties of 20-30 paddlers each to remove invasive water chestnut (trapa natans) from the Floating Meadows, the 1000 acre freshwater tidal marshland formed by the Mattabesset and Coginchaug Rivers.
Due to the pandemic, the Jonah Center has not organized large work parties. We have encouraged paddlers to go out solo or in small family groups. Bring a large plastic bag, gently pull up plants by the roots, place them in the bag, and deposit the plants near the informational kiosk in the boat launch parking area.
I’ve often wondered about espaliered trees, and they even figured in a short piece of fiction I once wrote. Espalier is the art of training dwarf trees to grow in a flat plane along a wall, fence, or trellis. They create an atmosphere of mystery, wonder, and an evocation of some kind of Garden of Eden. I’ve stopped to admire them at botanical gardens and occasionally at Ballek’s nursery in East Haddam. Because we see them in famous gardens, we tend to think of them as expensive or unattainable, as something no longer possible. As you will learn, you can easily grow an espaliered fruit tree for under $20 (under $30 if you choose a tree with four different types of apple or pear bearing branches) but you’ll need some simple hardware that might cost another $15. Or, you could just use bamboo, the way growers do. You will likely have fruit much sooner. I never bought an espaliered fruit tree from a nursery, but I did buy a very tiny birch that Nancy Ballek had pruned on dwarf rootstock that was highly contorted. Sixteen years later it is still 30” tall and about 40” wide. That demonstrates the power of dwarf rootstock. And that is the secret of espalier.