COUNTRY
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2019
Serving Marine on St. Croix, Scandia, May Township
VOL. 36 NO. 27 www.countrymessenger.com $.75
LAND: Estate planning workshop Nov. 13. PAGE 6
Local filmmaker to be featured at Marine Documentary Night
Keep your pets safe during Halloween
Gayle Knutson to present ‘Just Shoot Me – The Not So Lucrative Career of Indie Filmmaking ‘
MATT ANDERSON EDITOR@COUNTRYMESSENGER.COM
Halloween is a lot of fun for kids and parents alike, but dangers are often overlooked for pets during the holiday. Foods like chocolate, candies and other Halloween items can all pose a potential risk for small pets during all the fun. Because Halloween is associated with plenty of candy, it is often the first place that pet owners find trouble. Scandia Veterinarian Dr. Steven
BY MATT ANDERSON EDITOR@COUNTRYMESSENGER.COM
Marine filmmaker, Gayle Knutson, will be at a screening hosted by The Marine Film Society and the Marine Community Library Nov. 7 at the Marine Village Hall. Knutson will screen two of her live action short films and two short documentaries, along with her stories of producing them. The live action short films are The Wagon and Grandfather’s Birthday. The documentaries are If There Were No Lutherans… Would There Still Be Green Jell-O? and Prisoner 32,232. “I wasn’t so much ‘inspired’ but rather fell into filmmaking in college (St. Cloud State) while looking for an easy major that didn’t have a lot of textbooks,” said Knutson. “I picked Mass Communications which, at the time, required you to take classes in radio, TV and filmmaking. But I didn’t like the filmmaking part as much as I liked working
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Local Marine filmmaker Gayle Knutson will be at the Marine Documentary Night Nov. 7 to screen several award winning films.
in radio, and eventually TV as a campus sports anchor.” Working as a reporter and announcer for KLCD radio and WAKX radio out of college, Knutson eventually worked her way into the corporate film services department at Honeywell in Minneapolis, which would be the push she needed into filmmak-
ing. “I started on the lowest rung in corporate film services at Honeywell,” she said. “I wanted to produce and direct Honeywell’s corporate videos back then, a field so male-dominated that whenever you saw a woman on
BLUE PEARL PET HOSPITAL
Blue Pearl Pet Hospital is the nearest emergency clinic for local residents to take their pets if an emergency situation happens on Halloween night.
Frech shares his knowledge of which candies pose the most risk for pets. “The bad one is chocolate toxicity,” he says. “There’s a chemical similar to caffeine that’s
SEE KNUTSON PAGE 2 SEE PETS PAGE 2
Gravel bed trees find new homes in Marine BY JOHN GOODMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
It may have been a rainy Saturday morning, but the dozen Marine community volunteers were energized and ready to get to work planting trees. Fifteen bare-root northern Catalpa and Kentucky coffee trees had spent the summer growing in the community’s new gravel bed, a simple wood frame structure of irrigated gravel. This growing method increases the chances that a tree will survive when later planted in soil. Forest adviser John Goodfellow explained that, “Transplanting is a stressful time for any plant because a lot of its root system is lost when it’s removed from the ground. Trees grown in a gravel bed are easier to harvest. There is no digging required. The trees are gently pulled, and the loose gravel simply falls away from the fine fibrous roots.” An added bonus for this Marine urban forest project: the cost of bare root stock is significantly less than similar container-grown or balledand-burlap trees. The trees were planted on Oct. 19,
in Burris Park, at the Marine Folk School, at Oakland Cemetery, along the walking paths in Jackson Meadow, and in a few residential yards where they replaced dead trees. This is the Marine Forest Advisory Committee’s first tree planting event, but it won’t be its last. The Marine urban forest is comprised of nearly 1,000 trees. Goodfellow noted that many large specimen trees are now approaching the end of their life, whether from natural mortality or tree disease like oak wilt. Ten percent of Marine’s urban forest are ash trees, which will be vulnerable to the emerald ash borer larvae. The newly formed Marine Forest Advisory Committee is planning ahead for future plantings. They will identify which species to grow next year from the DNR list of tree species likely to do well in this area despite climate change. Kentucky coffee trees, despite the name, are Minnesota natives that do well in both cold and heat and are good replacements for ash trees. Marine is already home to the largest northern Catalpa in the state. This
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SEE TREES PAGE 2
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John Goodfellow and Sara Rottunda, planting a Kentucky coffee tree on school grounds, Marine on St. Croix.
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