Farm/City Day

Hosted by Steuben County Cooperative Extension

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It’s a pretty big deal . A large farm hosts the event and Co-ex does all the work. They get thousands of visitors. We set up a lumber and honey exhibit. Lesson #1: when they put you in a merchant tent, your booth is supposed to face the inside of the tent. We set it up the backwards. I noticed when the crowds started walking through and everybody else faced in.

My young bee apprentice helped. “Mr. Sieling, may look at the displays?”

“Sure.” As soon as she left, the crowd thickened. I had to switch from lumber talk to bee talk as fast as a TV switches from one camera angle to the next. TT returned as the crowd thinned. She brought cartons of free chocolate milk.

“Mr. Sieling, may I go up in that thing?” Steuben Rural Electric had set up a truck with a twin basket cherry picker. They were giving rides in the baskets. The truck’s grill stared at our booth and the engine ran in my left ear all day, making it hard to hear, especially the little Chinese man with the two pumpkins who bought honey and tried to tell me something about our figured ironwood sample. “He paints on wood!” Shouted the large white woman with him.

TT returned with string cheese. Later her family came. They got lost in the corn maze. She brought back two of everything: Food samples, magnetized signs, compasses, thermometers and two rain gauges. I wondered if we could sell them.

Lesson #2: Prepare displays to handle wind. Our honey variety poster blew over 1,000,000 times. Lesson #3: Price everything to the even dollar including tax. There’s no time to use a calculator when there is a line of people grabbing jars of honey. The wind especially wanted to grab twenty dollar bills and blow them into the parking lot. Rather than carefully sort bills, I finally stuffed them straight into my pockets until they bulged.

Lesson #4 Take along an 11 year old that likes to talk. “Mr. Sieling, what color are your eyes? What color was your hair when you were my age? Did you know a compass doesn’t point to true North? It just points to the nearest metal object. So if you follow the needle, you’re sure to find civilization, or at least an old junked car or steel barrel. I think you’d like the corn maze. Could we go through it after we pack up?”

Three hours later…TT has her compass out. “Which way now, Mr. Sieling?” I’ve seen that same flyer on the ground at this intersection three times. There should have been a sign in/sign out book at the maze entrance. How many people could be lost in here? I imagined sometime late in November, the farmer would come upon two skeletons while cutting corn, lying in a primitive corn hut—an unidentified adult male and female child. Around them he’d find a few rude stone implements and some woven corn leaf blankets. Their two compasses pointed toward the man’s mouldy steel toed shoes, the two rain gauges were set up to catch water. A short journal was scratched onto a flat rock nearly obliterated by weathering: “33 days, thirst, can’t go on much longer. TT wants to do this again next year…