Mentor Spotlight: Hawk Hurst

Hello GRP Family,

I thought I might share a little of what my time in the offseason (aka, Winter) is like where I live. My wife, Ayal, and I homestead just West of Asheville, NC, in a wildly beautiful place abundant with forests, streams, meadows and lots of wildlife. In the cold season we often hear and/or see black bear, deer, bobcats, coyotes, skunks, groundhogs, turkey, chipmunks, as well as, a wide variety of song birds and woodpeckers at our bird feeders.

My daily schedule starts with me stoking the fire each morning, grinding some coffee on an old time hand grinder, and reading some sports (NBA and Duke basketball mostly) and news articles on the New York Times website. I enjoy basketball and am a BIG Duke Blue Devil fan, even though I graduated from the University of Oklahoma. Most days I go to the barn to chop wood and deliver it to the house with a wheelbarrow. We have a small pond, adjacent to our organic garden, which is home to about 40 Coy fish. I enjoy feeding them chow pellets, delighting in the multitude of colors they flash and the ability they have to move so easily through the water. I sometimes stream a couple of shows - I just finished re-watching Game of Thrones and we have recently enjoyed a show called Silo, on Apple TV. Before bed each day, I read several chapters from a book - I am a big murder mystery fan, but alternate reading novels about a wide variety of subjects. Donna Leon and Tana French are my favorite mystery writers.

There are three Winter projects that I have just completed: one was making a 6’ X 3’ cold frame (like a tiny greenhouse) to grow plants in when it is still too cold to start them in the garden. I made the frame out of Eastern Cedar (Juniper), which is very rot resistant. The top has a large piece of plexiglass to allow light in. I outfitted it with an automatic vent opener. This vent opener relies on a cylinder filled with wax that expands when it gets too hot (opening the frame) and shrinks when it gets too cold (closing the frame). I will plant some lettuce, arugula, kale, chard, and radishes inside the cold frame, in the next couple weeks. The second project is an ongoing restoration of our forest. This mainly involves thinning crowded trees and the removal of an invasive vine, called Oriental Bittersweet. This vine is quite pernicious and I am reminded of the scene in Harry Potter when Ron is being swallowed up by the roots as Hermione screams at him to, ‘Just Relax’. My last project was laying out a paved walkway leading from our timber frame porch, built during the COVID year, that now connects to a small bridge over the creek. I also had to build a couple of dry-stack rock walls for some landscape beds, beside this walkway.

I am looking forward to returning to GRP this Spring to work with our SEE school groups. I also plan to continue seeking out more Turtle Drum rocks - last year we discovered several more AND a quarry site near Long Rock where two of the drums may have been excavated from. I plan to blog about this some more, at a later date. For now, enjoy the rest of Winter, as Spring will be here before we know it, and with that, Summer Camp is just around the corner.

Many Blessings, Hawk Hurst, Senior Mentor and Naturalist