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Family Fun Day pays homage to local businesses
With a theme of “Happiness is Putnam County home grown,” the annual Family Fun Day program at the Putnam County Fair featured seven local businesses from a flower farm to meat markets to soap makers.
With Sandy Rissler, president of the host Allspice Club, emceeing the program, she took the Community Building East crowd on a journey around Putnam County with stops at:
• Pink Door Flower Farm in Cloverdale.
• Chandler’s Farm Market on U.S. 40 near the Putnam-Hendricks county line.
• Zaring Produce, located north of Fillmore.
• Sand Ridge Farm Market near Fillmore.
• Harris Sugar Bush, located east of Brick Chapel.
• Myers’ Market in the heart of Greencastle.
• Boyce Soaps and More from Reelsville.
It turned out to be a fun and interesting trip around Putnam County as owners detailed their businesses and told stories about why and how they got there.
Or as Rissler said, “I hope you’ve had an educated, enlightening and informative day as we’ve traveled around Putnam County.”
It was comical, too, as punctuated by the dry and self-deprecating humor of Bob Zaring from Zaring Produce near Fillmore.
A fixture at the local farmers market with his produce, Zaring said he got his start as a 10-year-old 4-H’er and “from the first frost to the last frost,” continues to raise a variety of vegetables that he sells at the farmers market and to four local restaurants for their use.
“It’s a big hobby, I enjoy raising produce,” Zaring deadpanned.
”The highlight had to be when I was invited by Bridges (Craft Pizza and Wine Bar) to go to New York for the James Beard event,” Zaring recalled about when Bridges’ Chef Sal Fernandez was invited in October 2018 to cook at the prestigious James Beard House in New York City, a so-called performance space for visiting chefs to “celebrate, nurture and honor chefs.”
Zaring explained growing his produce takes long hours with very little help.
“It’s hard to find help,” Zaring said, “and when I do, they want paid daily. I found out why that is, they don’t come back the next day.”
People most certainly come back for Zaring’s veggies and fruit.
“I probably have four or five people call me every day about their gardens,” he told the Family Fun Day audience to laughs of respect. “Why they think I know anything, I don’t know.”
Zaring was asked what the biggest pumpkin he ever grew weighed. He quickly responded 485 pounds.
“You have a to be with it every day,” he cautioned. “It’s like babysitting because they grow so fast, they’ll snap the stem off.”
Another woman wanted to know how he keeps the deer out of his crops since she lives nearby and the animals devastate her garden.
“Electric fence,” he stated flatly.
“Deer are not the problem,” Zaring continued. “Raccoons are. Coons get in there and pull up the stalks and take one bite of the corn and throw it aside and go on to the next ear.”
Zaring said he and his brother tried to outsmart the coons and planted a patch of sweet corn in the middle of field corn. They went out and checked on it one weekend late in the season, finding it almost ready but deciding to wait until Tuesday to pick it all.
“When we came back, there wasn’t any sweet corn left.”
Squirrels, meanwhile, are the problem -- aka “biggest nemesis” -- for Arthur Harris and wife Becky at the 7,000-tap Harris Sugar Bush operation east of Brick Chapel, site of a sugar camp for “close to 140 years.”
It often takes 50 or 60 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, Harris advised, noting that “if we get a good run, we’ll gather 6,000 to 8,000 gallons of sugar water a day.”
“It’s different from when there were just buckets,” he added. “Squirrels like to chew through the tubing.”
Back in the 1800s, Indiana led the nation in maple syrup production, Harris said, calling his operation one of the largest sugar camps in Indiana.
“It’s a difficult thing to keep in operation,” he conceded, “but it’s been good for our family.”
The operation is “totally controlled by the weather,” Harris said, adding that they begin tapping around the first of the year now, while traditionally Valentine’s Day was the start of the season.
“To tap 7,000 trees takes a day or two,” he smiled, suggesting that missing one day of production can cost the business as much as $10,000.
Sugar Bush will be furnishing all the maple cream for candy at the Indiana State Fair, a project the Harrises are currently working on.
How do they know when to tap, he was asked.
“That’s the praying part,” Harris said. “About twice a year, if you made an offer, you could own a sugar camp. We’ve only done it because we lived on baloney and beans to make it.”
Meanwhile, Myers’ Market owner Mitch Myers stressed that his butcher shop/deli “is more than just a good steak or good chicken salad sandwich.”
After his dream became a reality with the business opening in 2013, Myers is proud to say “here we are 11 years later and the goal is still to provide my hometown with the best meats and products available.”
Proud of things like rotating 70 different kinds of bratwurst in his store, Myers said he now partners with a number of restaurants in Greencastle, as well as one in Brazil and the Myers’ Dari-Ette in Bainbridge
He dreams of further expansion with more products and a larger space, telling the Family Fun Day gathering that Myers’ Market “owns it own building and another building right now with a larger location.”
Jerry and Matt Chandler of Chandler’s Farm Market on U.S. 40, west of Stilesville, also shared its origin and growth.
What started with dwarf trees in the 1970s finds them now 25 feet tall, Jerry Chandler noted, adding that apple production is down to 20-25 varieties as the public’s tastes have changed.
Sharing that back in 1919, Indiana was the largest apple-growing state, Putnam County was the largest county producer during that time, Chandler said.
Jerry Chandler was 30 when he and wife Vyanne started the business that is now in its 49th year. “We didn’t have any children, so we thought, ‘Why not raise apples and strawberries?’”
Matt Chandler and wife Lisa have come aboard since 2019, planting some of the orchard’s first new trees since 1984.
With agri-tourism in full bloom in the fall with hayrides and the addition of a pick-your-own sunflowers expected, September and October remain the busiest months with you-pick apples, school tours and the pumpkin patch.
Family Fun Day concluded with the afternoon purse auction that raised $2,585 for community service endeavors of the Putnam County Extension Homemakers via the sale of 20 purses stuffed with specialty items and gift cards.
The day’s annual awards went to nurse practitioner and past president of the Extension Homemakers, Pam Overton, as the Edith and Noble Fry Memorial Award winner and the members of the Putnam County Extension Office -- including Mark Evans, Jenna Nees, Kim Beadles, Kristy Straziscar and Bronwyn Spencer -- as Spirit of the Fair recipients.