Joe Flowers, a researcher at North Carolina State University, describes the inside of a hive at a recent demonstation at Weaver Street Market. Photo by Kirk Ross

By Susan Dickson
Staff Writer

As the number of honeybee hives around the world steadily declines, farmers, beekeepers and scientists are trying to spread the word about the importance of bees and pollination.

Last week was National Pollinator Week, and local beekeepers and experts hosted educational events throughout the area.

At Weaver Street Market on Thursday, onlookers viewed a bee cage and talked with experts from N.C. State University, the North Carolina Cooperative Extension and the Orange County Beekeepers’ Association.    More »

Distinctive white leaf underside of pink-flowered Himalaya-berry.  Photo by Ken Moore

By Ken Moore 

The Fourth of July is here, traditional blackberry-picking time. I enjoyed seeing a Dad and two youngsters out on bikes picking berries along one of Carrboro’s inner-city country lanes during the past weekend. The huge briery berry patch in my wild yard is heavy with fruit, though sadly not as large as hoped for. Our little climatic dry spot on the western edge of Carrboro simply has not been blessed with the recent rains falling all around us.   More »

Director Tom Quaintance (left) and company members hoist Matt Baldiga, who plays Fagin, on their shoulders during rehearsal. Photo Courtesy of Summer Youth Conservatory

By Susan Dickson
Staff Writer

During the summer months, the halls of UNC’s Center for Dramatic Arts are usually pretty quiet. This summer, though, the center is bustling with the activities of more than 40 local young actors and actresses.

With the combined efforts of the ArtsCenter’s Summer Youth Performing Arts Conservatory and PlayMakers Repertory Company, a young cast will present “Oliver!,” a musical theater adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic Oliver Twist, in July.

“It’s nice to have the building buzzing,” said Kathy Hunter Williams, a founding member of the conservatory and a company member at PlayMakers. “It’s been so deathly quiet in the summer.”

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Queen Anne’s Lace, a “wild carrot.” Photo by Ken Moore

By Ken Moore

They began flowering weeks ago and they are still making a show along roadsides and wherever folks allow them to move about freely on their lawns and in their gardens.

I learned to recognize the green winter leafy rosettes of Daisy Fleabane (Erigeron annuus) some years ago and I deliberately give them freedom wherever they appear in my wild landscape. My reward is masses of tiny white daisy flowers on multi-branching stems, three to five feet tall, cheering up my yard and garden areas for weeks and weeks. And this year, for whatever reason, they seem to be flowering in profusion everywhere, inspite of the continuing drought.

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By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer

Hoping to replicate the success of similarly designed facilities in Asheville and West Jefferson, a group of local grocers and economic development leaders are researching the possibility of setting up a shared-use food-processing center to serve small farms and food businesses in Alamance, Chatham, Durham and Orange counties. The purpose of the facility would be to foster the production and marketing of locally grown value-added foods. As conceived, the center would provide processing equipment and storage space for individuals and small businesses to produce a variety of food items. It would also provide technical support and marketing and business-planning assistance.

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Eric Montross at his Father’s Day Camp last weekend. Now in its 13th year, the camp raises money for special projects for the N.C. Children’s Hospital. Photo by Brian Strickland

Catching up with Eric Montross

By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer

When you think of Eric Montross, the words “high-performance liquid chromatographer” probably aren’t the first to pop into your head. “Really tall,” maybe, or “National Championship.”

Last Friday and Saturday you may have noticed several dozen people around town in Carolina Blue jerseys with “Montross” and a double-zero emblazoned on the back. They’re the 13th graduating class of Montross’ annual Father’s Day Basketball Camp — a fundraiser for the N.C. Childrens’ Hospital. Like their predecessors, the 140 or so campers spent two days on the hardwood at the Smith Center working on their moves with Montross and a few of his buddies. And like each class of campers before them, they helped raise thousands for the Children’s Hospital.

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By Ken Moore

Our roadsides are so filled with flowering wild plants that it frustrates me to focus on just one or two for description in The Citizen.

Right now, I have to celebrate the Trumpet-creeper. Some folks call it Trumpet Vine or Cow-itch Vine. There are likely other names associated with this common native weedy vine, of which the bright orange tubular flowers are guaranteed to attract nearby hummingbirds. Keep an eye out to find occasional peach- and yellow-colored variations. The flowers seem to hang singly or in clusters in the air at the tips of long stems reaching down from varying heights, be it low fence posts or abandoned barn chimneys. More »

By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer

Early this week, just off the gravel road that leads from what one might call downtown Haywood, Jim Massey was chatting with Miz Thang, an artist from Hawkinsville, Georgia who’s been touring the countryside “drivin’ and lookin’.”

Naturally, a stop at Massey’s Holly Hill Daylily and Crinum Farm was on the list. Massey, a retired botany professor and the longtime director of the University of North Carolina Herbarium, has built an impressive array of daylilies over the years and, in the three or so cultivated acres that they dominate, has more than 1,700 varieties — each marked and cataloged and, usually, with a story attached. He also keeps watch over more than three dozen varieties of crinums and an assortment of Verbenas, Red Hot Pokers and other perennials.

The farm also is home to a splendid collection of rare and unusual poultry — Domaniques, Ameraucana, Silver Seabright and others — either free-ranging or scratching about in their pens.
But for Miz Thang and hundreds of other folk and outsider artists, the exuberant botanist from Texas is known more for his passion for their works and, more recently, as curator of the Historic Haywood Folk Art Museum, which opened for the first time last year for the early-June to late-July daylily season and is now open to visitors to the farm each weekend through July 22.

This weekend, the farm will host a Potluck in the Pasture fundraiser for ChathamArts. More »

After 32 years on the Carrboro beat, Officer Bob hits the road

By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer

While Officer Bob Murdaugh says he’s the only person of his acquaintance who’s ever been bounced from the Boot Hill Saloon during Daytona Beach’s annual Bike Week, certainly it must have happened to many hundreds of other individuals. Regardless, the image of Officer Bob being bounced, in Daytona Beach or otherwise, is entirely discordant with the image of Officer Bob that’s been forged in the minds of so manyCarrboro residents in the course of his some 32 years of service, and is no way to begin to tell his story.

Very recently retired from the Carrboro Police Department (May 31 was his official final sign-off), Murdaugh is looking tanned and rested as he enjoys a late-morning breakfast on the patio at Breadmen’s. He’s been spending a lot of time aboard his trusty BMW, and, already well out of regs, is eight days into a burgeoning white beard.

He’s here to talk, in his words, “facts, fables and philosophy,” and in the course of an extended conversation, each is well represented.

Back to the bouncing later.

The making of an officer
“Somehow,” Bob Murdaugh recollects, “I was made a member of the safety patrol at Hope Valley Elementary School. So I was in uniform and in law enforcement early on.

“But I never really aspired to be a police officer. It just sort of worked out that way.”
Murdaugh graduated from Durham’s Jordan High School in 1970 and headed off to become a “two-time Duke University freshman.”

“There was a period of time when I was between semesters at Duke University, and I was in dire need of a job. A friend from high school asked me if I wanted his stepfather to find me a job. He was in the administration at Duke University. And I said, `Sure; I’ll take anything.’ More »

The finishing touches on Mike Bensen’s new Southern Rail are not that far away, now that the steel frame connecting the two railroad cars is in place. If you’ve traveled through downtown Carrboro recently, you might have seen the frame lowering trusses into place. The structure will bridge the two railroad cars.

Bensen, a Chapel Hill native who own St. Ex in Washington D.C., says he’s not that far from opening. Interior work on the cars proceeds as well.
Inside the westernmost coach, there’s a new mural of a diver and a giant squid next to the words, “Scenic University Lake sustainable food source.” At the rear of the car, there’s still an old mural from the cars’ past, a mural for the Carrboro Cosmos soccer team.

A group of local folks stopped in their tracks on the edge of one of Mason Farm’s Penstemon fields. Photo by Ken Moore

By Ken Moore

Summer has not officially arrived, but the summer heat made its dramatic entry this past Memorial Day weekend. And we are well along into the predicted drought; without ample rainfall soon, that anticipated bumper crop of “4th of July blackberries” will be sparse indeed.

While we’re having to provide supplemental water to maintain the health of our cultivated gardens, the native plants along our roadsides and woodland borders are continuing to put on a show without the additional help from our watering hoses.

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 By Matthew Fiorentino
Correspondent

For six weeks now, two outreach workers have been hitting the streets of Orange County getting to know the homeless and the panhandlers. They talk to these people of the streets, earning their trust, learning about their situation and, most importantly, coming up with ideas about how to help them.

At a meeting earlier this month of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce’s Community Leadership Collaboration, this survey of people on the street was touted as an important method for developing ways to deal with panhandling downtown.

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The day started around 4:30 a.m. That’s when Miguel Torres and Rudy Rodriguez of Lantern restaurant showed up at the Chapel Hill Creamery to dig a pit and start the coals for the goat and lamb that would be cooked Monterrey style.

By 7 a.m. the goat and lamb, wrapped in cactus, banana leaves and foil were in the ground and covered. Passing by, you wouldn’t know that beneath the two stone markers over the freshly disturbed earth something culinary was happening.

Bill Dow of Ayshire Farm serving up warm radicchio
and goat cheese and visiting with Lucy Harris of SEEDS.

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Audio: Carlo Petrini remarks at the Chapel Hill Creamery, May 23, 2007

While Slow Food USA’s executive director Erika Lesser translates, the international movement’s founder, Carlo Petrini, encourages the crowd to eat well, eat less and respect the earth. Photo by Kirk Ross

By Matthew Fiorentino
Correspondent

In the pasture of the Chapel Hill Creamery, filled with the smells of the finest local foods and the audible sighs of gastronomic pleasure, and surrounded by cows, Carlo Petrini, founder of the global Slow Food movement took in the moment.

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Perry Harrison looks at Arlington through the bus window. Photo by Meghan Cooke

By Meghan Cooke
Courtesy of the Carrboro Commons

The memories are still here. Memories of battlefields scarred by the loss of friends, family and comrades years ago. Memories to honor their sacrifice. Memories of one soldier, out of many, remembered by comrades and family for his service and life.

Almost 40 members, family and friends of the American Legion Post 6 of Chapel Hill and the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 9100 boarded a bus Wednesday, April 25, for a day-long journey to Washington D.C., where they honored Carl L. Fritz and visited the World War II memorial.

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