johnbyronkuhner.com

A friend has been making up fun campaign posters using old pictures.  This from my teaching days:

More on native plants in the Catskills and in the town of Denning here.

Dear Neighbor,

My name is John Kuhner, and I’m asking for your vote for Denning Town Council. I’ve lived here for five years – long enough to convince me that Denning is my home and I want to do my part for the town by serving on the town council. I may be a bit unfamiliar to you, so I’m writing to provide some background and tell you why I’m running.

Before moving here I graduated from Princeton and then taught for ten years in both public and private schools. I taught Latin, as well as history and English. I moved here five years ago and still sometimes teach to keep the bills paid, but I’ve primarily worked as a landscaper and plantsman at Catskill Native Nursery. I’ve literally spent most of my adult life teaching children and planting trees, and I’m proud of that. I also came here to write more, and I got my first book, Staten Island, or Life in the Boroughs, published in 2010. I’m working on the next one. Gardening is my thing: I’ve been one of the people who made the Denning Town Garden by town hall. I did the original plant design for it. It’s small, but I think we did a nice job and we’re proud of it. I’m also on the board of the Neversink Association and started their now-yearly plant sales. These are the kinds of small things that can make our community life better.

Town Council is very much public service – most of the work is about attending to the basic details. I understand this and know that the first duty the town council has is to keep the budget in line, especially given the flooding we’ve had in the past two years. I live frugally myself and I promise my votes will keep my town government doing the same.

But there are some things that I think we need our local government to attend to. Specifically:

• We’ve had an unsightly and noisy “temporary” bridge outside town hall for the entire time I’ve lived here, and it’s time to get a real bridge installed. This may involve harassing the County and being the “squeaky wheel” in Kingston, which I can certainly do. But someone with authority needs to get this problem solved, whatever it takes.
• We also need a voice on the town council who is willing to advocate with the state and with New York City for better wildlife management. Denning looks beautiful now, but the forest is not regenerating: we probably have more registered voters in town than we have young cherry or maple seedlings. This is actually a serious problem, and the cause is state mismanagement of the deer population. The Town Council doesn’t have the power to resolve this problem by itself, but it needs people with ecological expertise to start working with the state on this issue. We really don’t want to wait anymore. We need to be harvesting many many more deer from the forest or there will be no forest at all, and we need to start doing it soon. The first step would be for the town council to advocate for permission for hunters to take more deer. But ecological expertise will be useful on other issues: I’m one of the founders of the Catskill Native Plant Society, and I was asked by the Catskill Stream Buffer Initiative people to revise their plant lists when they were designing seed mixes. The Town Council can work with the state and city to keep our forest healthy and wild.
• There has also been a lot of talk about bringing high-speed internet to the town, which I support. I think the town council should commit to getting internet access in the town for everyone who wants it. This may involve finding outside grant money and writing grant proposals – things that I am comfortable with and can do effectively.

I’m running for town council because I can bring the commitment, competence, energy, and ideas to get things done and act reasonably when unexpected problems arise (which they always do). I also know that I don’t know everything about this town, but I’m willing to listen. I believe everyone who’s here has something to add to this place, and I think my willingness to listen will make me a good representative.

For further information about me feel free to look at my website (www.johnbyronkuhner.com), or send me an email (jbkuhner@gmail.com) or give me a call (718 753-2500). And remember to vote November 5th!

Sincerely,

John Kuhner
65 Voss Road
Claryville NY 12725

It’s been a bad year for a lot of garden crops for me – if the deer can eat they have – but for fruit and nuts it’s been extraordinary – heavy peaches, heavy apples, heavy walnuts.  And now the beechnuts are starting to drop to the forest floor, and it’s a superb year for them as well.  I started noticing them in the leaf litter on a hike up Giant Ledge today, and the briefest effort with a friend got us a couple of handfuls of the nuts, enough to share with others.  For volume of nuts walnuts are the best – in a great year like this you can get dozens of pounds of nuts under one tree – but beechnuts have a simple wildness that I love adding to my diet.  And if you have time – which I probably don’t this particular fall – this is the year to really gather them in.  Of course the nuts don’t go wasted in the forest – they’re important food for birds (especially turkeys), deer, bears, and rodents of all sorts.  They also have a chocolate color which is lovely just to look at.

To eat the nuts in the photo the tough outer shell needs to be removed (I do it with my hands though you can also do it with your teeth) and then pop them in your mouth.  You can also roast them to get a bit more flavor out of them.