Outdoors in August 2022

Tobacco barn

“Keep calm because August is here.” – Unknown

This may be remembered as the year of drought and oppressive heat. Trees and shrubs are showing signs of stress in parts of the state that missed isolated rainfall events, and many fern species in shaded woods have turned brown. Animals are having a full-time job looking for water and birds are at my bird baths all day long getting a drink. Even though it has been a dismal year weather-wise, there are still a lot of interesting things to see when we are out and about.

Common buckeye butterfly on a wild Rudbeckia flower

The native trailing wild bean, Strophostyles helvola, may be common but easily overlooked as populations can be sparse in their habitat. Flowers are pink and the lower keel has a dark purple projection that curls upward like the raised trunk of an elephant. Leaflets are in threes, with bluntly lobed leaves.

Groundnut, Apias americana is another native pea family vine that blooms in August. The flowers of this plant are clustered and very fragrant and they are visited by many of the smaller native bees that can climb inside.

Groundnut flower cluster

In a field with mowed paths I recently observed a good number of the non- native wool carder bees on the flowers of birdsfoot trefoil. This plant is also member of the pea family and has yellow, puffy, slipper-like flowers.

Wool carder bee with head inside birdsfoot trefoil flower

This same field had thousands of grasshoppers that took flight as I walked along the path. Most seemed to be what I have nicknamed the ‘plus and minus” grasshopper, for the tiny patterns on the wings. There was also a seed bug on Queen Anne’s lace that had interesting vein patterns on its wing tips.

Wing tip vein patterns on seed bug

A little eft of the red spotted newt put in an appearance in a golf course fairway a couple of days after a heavy rain, as is their habit. They come out of the woods looking for food, seem to lose their way getting back to the safety of leaf litter and often need a rescue from mowers.

Eft returned to the safety of the woods

Katydids are another late summer insect that may be heard rather than seen. Their loud rasping ‘night music’ begins in late July and is joined by crickets by August.  

 Common true katydid

This morning I was out just before sunup and heard odd noises on the siding of the garage. I saw two dark forms moving up the siding and needed a flashlight to discover that they were gray tree frogs. Must have been some insects there they were hunting, I guess.

Gray tree frog climbing up the house

Tobacco is being harvested and hung in barns now. Any barn is something of interest to me, and tobacco barns in use are just one type I like. Any barn with a flag, too, for some reason. I am also a fan of playful or interestingly creative farm signs.

Something bad must have happened

I am hoping we come to the end of this drought in time for water supplies and plants to recover before winter. Just saw a monarch laying an egg on milkweed that hadn’t succumbed to aphid damage or drought, so that is something good. As you travel about outdoors, at any time of year, do not forget to look up. You may miss something…

Pamm Cooper

 

Outdoors in September

Sunflowers along the edge of a field

“By all these lovely tokens, September days are here. With summer’s best of weather and autumn’s best of cheer.” – Helen Hunt Jackson

September arrived with a splash this year, and a big one at that. Hurricane Ida may have spared us her winds, but not the heavy rains and the flooding that came with it. Temperatures at least have dropped and people  have a reprieve from watering gardens and lawns.  

Saturated soils resulted in the standing water on this turf area.

Flooding and strong currents here at the Glastonbury ferry entrance ramp on the Connecticut River has stopped ferry service temporarily

The extended hot, humid weather has led to a burst of stinkhorn fungi in mulched areas and woodlands. These fungi have spores in a slimy material that is visited by flies attracted by the putrid odor. After visiting this stinky slime and getting nothing for their trouble, the flies move on, dispersing the spores as they go. The stinky squid fungi are small, orange and have three or four fingerlike “arms”. Spores are often in mulch that was added to gardens earlier in the year.

Stinky squid fungi in images above

I found a little 4-toed salamander far from its woodland domain the day after a rain- just missed it with a mower. This is Connecticut’s smallest salamander being only 2- 3 ½ inches long.  These salamanders are found found in both moist and dry woodlands and in wooded swamps. Sphagnum moss is usually present nearby and is often used by the female for nesting.

4-toed salamander

On a woodland trail, a female American pelecinid wasp flew by and landed on a leaf. They have a long ovipositor that they use to inserts eggs with especially where grubs are in the soil. These black wasps diet consists primarily of nectar, perhaps supplemented by some pollen and water.

Female American pelecinid wasp

Three weeks ago I came across an elm sphinx caterpillar on slippery elm. This caterpillar has four horns on the thorax and one on the rear, like most sphinx caterpillars. it can be green or brown, but this one started off green and then just turned brown this week. Food is exclusively elm.

Travelling through tobacco farmland this past week, there was a lot of harvesting activity. Drying barns are filling up with sun grown broadleaf tobacco leaves. Tobacco sheds are vanishing as the land is bought up for development and houses..

Drying shed with hanging tobacco leaves

Hay bales in a barn with green doors

There are so many native plants that have fruits now- viburnums, filberts, shrub and tree dogwoods, black cherry, winterberry and spicebush just to name a few. Along with many herbaceous plants like pokeweed and goldenrods, these fruits are valuable to all kinds of wildlife including migrating birds.

Arrowwood viburnum

Red osier dogwood fruit

Tansy, an introduced member of the aster family, is blooming now. Its yellow, button- like flowers have a striking pattern. The plans has a long history of cultivation for its medicinal qualities.

Of September, who can say it better than this?

“…there is a clarity about September. On clear days, the sun seems brighter, the sky more blue, the white clouds take on marvelous shapes; the moon is a wonderful apparition, rising gold, cooling to silver; and the stars are so big. The September storms… are exhilarating…”
— Faith Baldwin, 

Pamm Cooper

Waning Moon in September

 

Exploring Connecticut Barns

 

Spiffy barn on Ferry Lane in Glastonbury

I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the Connecticut landscape, there are so many barns that are reminders of the agricultural age that once, and still is a prominent component of the landscape. Sometimes all that remains of many farm properties is the original farmhouse and a barn or two. The barns that remain, whether still in use or not, are interesting to me mostly because of the quality of both the materials and the workmanship that went into building them. Also, in a nostalgic way, I grew up in dairy country in New York State and I used to play in and around barns where the smells of the grain and the animals were a major feature of daily life.

Connected brown barns in South Windsor

A good site for investigating any barns is https://connecticutbarns.org/. You can click on the map to find barns in a particular town, and there is a picture and pertinent information as to past and present uses and historical interest, if any. This site is a valuable resource in identifying and learning about barns you may have an interest in.

One of the more familiar barns in Connecticut is the one at the Nathan Hale Homestead in Coventry. A post and beam framed structure built in the 1760s, it is located on South Street. This barn is on the National Register of Historic Places in Connecticut. It is built in the English/ New England hybrid style which normally had a gable roof and vertical sheathing.

Nathan Hale Homestead Barn

The Morse Farm barn in Scotland is listed on the National Register, the State Historic Resource Inventory and the State Register. This carriage house style barn has one and one half stories and features a gambrel roof design. A gambrel roof has two distinctive slopes on both sides, with the upper slope pitched at a shallow angle and the lower slope at a steeper angle. This allowed for more head room when working on the upper floor.  This barn had a combined use as a stable and   carriage storage.

Morse Farm carriage house barn with gambrel roof

Jarmoc  Farms in Enfield, a tobacco farm, has a typical carriage house style barn, with one large front entrance with double sliding doors. As its names suggests, this style of barn was used to house carriages and tack, and horses were stabled nearby. These typically were open fronted, single story buildings, having the roof supported by regularly spaced pillars. The exterior or carriage house barns often echoed the style of the farmhouse.

Barn with open door- Jarmoc Farms Enfield

On Newberry Road in South Windsor, there is a good example of a barn of the English bank structure. New England barns are usually a type of bank barn, built into the side of a hill giving ground level access to one side, but a ramp or rarely a bridge were used to access the doors. Roof and eave overhangs were typically one foot to protect walls from rain water. Ventilators and cupolas were added to some barns in the 19th century to reduce moisture build-up. Some barns had stairs, but most featured ladder access to the second floor.

New England bank style barns in South Windsor

 A picturesque red barn with white trim and a cupola located on Main Street, South Windsor, is an example of an English/New England hybrid style barn. The English barn is a simple building with a rectangular plan, a pitched roof, and a door or doors located on one or both of the long sides of the building. The New England style barn, built after 1830, could stand alone or be connected to other farm buildings and had an often off-centered end wall door for wagons to enter.

English/New England hybrid style barn with cupola in South Windsor

On Valley Falls Road in Vernon, the historic red barn, built between 1875 and 1920 features a gambrel bank style, a cupola and a timber frame structure. A milking stable was in the basement, featuring the typical cement floor and manure gutters and whitewashed walls.  Listed on the Local Historic District and the State Register, this historic barn features an annual Artist’s Day at the Farm event, with artists painting the barn and then auctioning the paintings later that same day.

Historic red barn on Valley Falls Road, Vernon

Across the street from the red barn is the Valley Falls Farm, featuring an historic English style barn that is also on the State Register. It features vertical sheathing and is painted white with green trim and has a huge bell on its precincts. Christian Sharps, inventor of the Sharps rifle, bought this farm in 1871. A Hungarian aristocrat, Hans Munchow built the horse stables and outbuildings after purchasing the property in 1910.

Valley Falls Farm barn and outbuildings

The Farwell Barn (Jacobson barn) located on Horsebarn Hill Road in Storrs, is a 19^th century post and beam framed clapboard barn acquired by the Connecticut Agricultural College, which later became the  University of Connecticut . This New England bank style barn is listed on the National Register, number 00001649.

Jacobson barn on Horsebarn Hill, Storrs

Jacobson barn on a foggy winter morning

Gilbert Road in Stafford features an English Bank style of barn. Not too far away, on 425 Old Springfield Road in Stafford there is the Greystone Farm English style barn that features exterior siding of gray fieldstone, flushboard and vertical siding on other sections. The roof is a gable type.

English bank style barn with matching birdhouse on Gilbert Road, Stafford

Greystone Farm barn with fieldstone

The Sheridan Farmstead (c. 1760) on Hebron Road in Bolton is listed on the State Register of Historic Places and features a gentleman’s barn built in 1900. A gentleman’s barn had a dual purpose as a weekend retreat and a working farm. The white extended English bank barn features a stairway to the upper level, hay chutes, a brick chimney, rolling doors, an earthen ramp and horse stalls on the ground level.

Sheridan Homestead gentleman’s barn Bolton, Ct.

Unlike most in our region, the tobacco barns were created with a single crop-single purpose in mind- gently drying and curing tobacco leaves. built in the rich Connecticut River valley, the barns pictured below are still used today.

Tobacco barn in Glastonbury

Tobacco barn in South Windsor

If a little interest has been sparked in our agricultural history and the barns that shaped its success, I hope you come discover some interesting barns in your travels.  It is hard to think that, in some way, there is any town in our little state that is not part of our rich farming history. Happy hunting!

Pamm Cooper                                                      all photos copyrighted 2017 by Pamm Cooper 

Barn with a red door in South Windsor