Cornhole tourney raises $4,500
The Quinebaug Valley Regional Rotaract Club hosted its 6th Annual Cornhole Classic Fund-raiser July 18 and raised $4,500 to benefit the club and Northeast Placement Services, a non-profit with the mission to provide integrated placement opportunities and services for adults with intellectual disabilities, ages 21 to 70+, so that they may be successful and valued members of the community. The event brought together new and old friends of the Rotaract club to the Thompson Raceway to compete in the annual tournament! The QVR Rotaract Cornhole committee chairs were Shannon Fagan and Megan Berkery, and they were helped by Rotaract club members and volunteers. First place and two-year defending champs were Bill Couture and Jake Valentine. Second place went to Kyle Liebsher and Kelsey Rhines and third place was Danielle Humphreys and Joey Farquharson.

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Planting a garden seems like a relatively simple task. I mean, you don’t really need a bunch of fancy tools and equipment; nor do you need to have specific skills or training. Basically, there is dirt and packets of seeds with sowing instructions. Sounds easy, right? However what I have discovered is that if you have a big garden and are of a certain physical age, growing vegetables is not quite that easy…
The first major challenge in planting a big garden is in the soil preparation. If grass is already growing somewhere, then chances are it will be a good spot for growing other things. Right? But, if grass is already growing there, this means that you will need to turn up the soil to remove the grass. This is hard work if you don’t own a fancy (and costly) rototiller thingy and tend to have backpain. Even after you turn up the soil and remove the grass roots, you usually discover rocks. The task of picking rocks and tilling soil usually leads me to the conclusion of wanting to buy some raised beds and order a truckload of soil to be delivered at my convenience. However, since I have packets of cucumber, squash and pumpkin seeds, I need to put them in a ground bed so that they have room to spread out and grow. So… three weeks and one bottle of ibuprofen later, I have successfully created a large ground garden bed and am ready to plant my seeds.
I’m not sure if I am alone in my thinking here, but I will admit that I find seed packet instructions confusing. When planting in the ground, is there really a difference between ¼” and ½”? A seed is not a honeybee with an internalized compass. Can a seed really tell the difference between a quarter of an inch?  And then, what is really meant by all the spacing requirement instructions? Do I plant seeds 18 inches apart? I can’t do that because my back really hurts, and I’ve mentally moved past the tilling of the soil exercise and so my garden is smaller than I intended and I will run out of room and I want to plant quite a few things. Finally, do I plant one seed close to another seed and then thin out the plants that grow or do I plant a few seeds together and then only use the strongest growing plant? This always seems a little unfair to me because if I have gone through all this work to make a plant grow, then why would I want to destroy those that fulfill the goal?
In the end, I always seem to plant varying seeds in bunches of 3 or 4 around a ½” down and about 4-6 inches apart. This typically works. Unfortunately, no matter what I do; no matter how much I till the soil; no matter if I put down a plastic barrier, if grass grew there before, it will grow there again and it will bring along hundreds of its weed friends! Maybe next year I will buy a big pot and two tomato plants and call it done!
ARGH! ARGH!
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!

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Above: Emida Roller touching up the mural last week. The mural committee, from left: Delpha Very, Amanda Kelly, Jess Porzuczek, David Sullivan, Dot Burnworth, Emida Roller and Elaine Turner. Linda Lemmon photos.

Above: Dancers from the Complex Performing Arts Center. Below: The start of the dedication of the MLK mural.



By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
PUTNAM — Laced together with hope and quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. the MLK mural was dedicated June 20.
MLK in the mural, already secure in his home on the outside wall of the Hale YMCA, seemed to gaze down on the committee members, painters, officials and members of the public. More a year in the making the Dot Burnworth, chair of the committee, traced the steps it took. She thought fund-raising would be the toughest but bankHometown, Centreville Bank and the Jewett City Savings Bank stepped up. Then the Putnam Arts Council, the Artist Guild, Putnam Rotary Club, PSA, Weiss, Hale & Zahansky, Sawmill Pottery, the YMCA, Rise Up for Arts, the Newell D. Hale Foundation and the Town of Putnam helped. Then the community stepped up. “The support was overwhelming” she said. The entire $15,000 budget was funded within one month.
Emida Roller, who has done nine other murals in this Connecticut project, said a record 128 surveys of the northeast corner residents about what MLK meant here came in. “Usually I would get 30, maybe 40.”  Guided by the surveys, “Teach Peace” is the title of the mural created on 15 aluminum panels and it’s completely local from Prudence Crandall in 1833 through the Putnam Underground to modern times populated with local models and even local flowers.
Putnam Mayor Barney Seney said “This couldn’t be done without community support. This is a great day for Putnam.”
Amanda Kelly, executive director the Hale Y, said MLK’s message and the Y’s dovetail. “We welcome all.” Jim Zahansky, board chair of the Hale YMCA, said there is a clear synergy between us and RiseUP. Sierra Ings, a student at Quinebaug Valley Community College read her poem pressing linear over circles. She noted that a circle doesn’t have room to be anything else. Progress does go away “it gets run over.”

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