Farm

The Claude Moore Farm at Turkey Run in McLean, Va., will hold an 18th century threshing day next Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., weather permitting.The farm is a typical small tobacco farm of the Colonial period, where the public can observe the farmer as he follows the seasonal cycle of planting, cultivating and harvesting, while the wife performs the domestic tasks in her one-room log house. On threshing day the public can help the family complete the fall chores, to thresh and winnow wheat, grind corn and make yeast cakes.

The doors of Resurrection Farm remain open to the homeless, to the spiritually broken who need time and support to get back on their feet.But the people who turned the 181-acre farm into a retreat and shelter 13 years ago are praying to remain strong in the face of news last week that their co-founder, the Rev. Brian Cox, has been suspended by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore for sexual misconduct."

Howard County has canceled plans for a bow-and-arrow hunt of about 150 deer that live on the 300-acre Blandair farm in east Columbia. Although the hunt was scheduled to occur earlier this month, State Department of Natural Resources officials will not issue a crop-damage permit without inspecting damage to growing crops. That will not be possible until spring at the earliest, so the hunt is off, according to Phil Norman, deer project manager for the county Department of Recreation and Parks.

Amid the rolling hills and walnut trees of Glenelg in northwest Howard County, change is coming.Until recently, county zoning rules required new-home lots in the area to be at least 3 acres. There are no high-density condominium communities here or smart-looking townhouse units lined up row after row.But, to be sure, the traditional farming community is heading slowly toward suburbanization. And there has been little opposition from residents."You have to face the fact that growth is going to occur when you live near two large cities," said Shirley Crist Meighan, 69, who was raised on a 175-acre dairy farm and was principal of West Friendship Elementary School.

Brother Thaddeus Grzankowski, who supervised his Franciscan religious order's Howard County farm, died Thursday of Alzheimer's disease at Stella Maris Hospice in Timonium. He was 84. Born in Perth Amboy, N.J., he moved to Poland with his family as a boy but returned to the United States in 1939 and worked as a butcher. He served as an Army cook during World War II. He entered the Conventual Franciscan Friars at Mount St. Lawrence in Becket, Mass., in 1948. He moved to St. Joseph Cupertino Friary in Ellicott City to work on the 50-acre farm that was then part of the seminary operation.

More than 100 pigs have vanished from a farm in western Carroll County that is under quarantine because of trichinosis. Officials were concerned that the pigs from the Marston farm of Carroll Schisler Sr. may have been taken to slaughterhouses. "The immediate public health concern - especially with the history of that farm - is that some of his pigs have shown up with trichinosis. ... That's something you don't want in the food chain," said Larry Leitch, the county's health officer. Schisler said he can't find 104 of the 105 pigs that were on the property, according to his attorney, Roland Walker.

State agriculture officials warned consumers yesterday that trichinosis - a disease caused by a parasitic worm - had been discovered in tests conducted on a dead pig taken from a Carroll County farm during a recent raid. "Any pork purchased from the Schisler farm should be discarded," said Anthony McCann, secretary of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. "If anyone chooses to eat pork acquired from this farm, it should be cooked to a consistent internal temperature of 170 degrees."

There hasn't been much Mildred Nixon hasn't tried over the past 40 years to make money on her 129-acre sprawl of rolling hills and trees in West Friendship.It has been a country club, a summer camp for children, a restaurant, and now it serves as rural corporate meeting spot, netting about $500,000 last year. The 68-year-old originally from Charlotte, N.C., hopes to expand a one-house assisted-care facility for the elderly to four to six more houses and possibly a group home for disadvantaged children.

Carol Hackney, a land preservation activist, has lived on two farms named Cold Saturday Farm in Carroll County -- one is her home on Oakland Road in Eldersburg, and the original was her childhood home a few miles away in Finksburg. Hackney's parents had bought the first Cold Saturday Farm at auction. Her father, H. Hamilton Hackney, was a judge in Baltimore's juvenile court who retired in 1943. He was from Pittsburgh, and her mother, Alice, was from New York City, but they met in Wyoming.

Sherri Hosfeld is a Carroll County farm girl who has lived a little. She studied photography for the past two years in New York City, lived near Greenwich Village, hung out in Central Park and spent hours in art museums."