Farm Stand Marfa

WINTER SQUASH COMES IN ALL SIZES

Harvest the fruits when the skins hardens. If the temperature stays below 50 degrees for a week or if it rains for days on end, harvest the fruits. Certainly bring the last of them in before a hard frost.
Buy winter squash at your nearest farmers’ market. You will find all shapes and sizes in glorious fall colors.
Bake them, roast them, puree them.

THE EASY WAY TO COOK WINTER SQUASH
Slice the squash, brush the pieces with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and roast them on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. Roast in the oven at 350 for 15 or 20 minutes. The cooking time really depends on how thick the slices are.

MY LAZY WAY TO COOK A PUMPKIN
Place the whole uncut pumpkin on a cookie sheet. Bake it at 300 until the pumpkin slumps. Once it cools, you can scoop out the seeds, spoon out the cooked pumpkin to use in purees and pies.

FOR OUR NON-MEAT-EATING FRIENDS
a song written in 1970 by Melanie a singer from Astoria, NY.
I’ll live on vegetables
I’ll grow on seeds
but I don’t eat animals
and they don’t eat me.
Melanie sings \"I Don\'t Eat Animals\"

STARGAZING

Amateur astronomer Paul Derrick’s Star Gazer column appears in The Big Bend Sentinel. Visit his site to find out how to get started stargazing. He explains magnitudes and angle distances which helps when you’re reading a planisphere, a star gazer’s must-have map. Before you begin your night sky watching adjust your eyes to the dark. Take along a red flashlight for reading. To make a white light flashlight red put red cellophane over the shield or paint it red with a marker.

Look to the southern sky. Far West Texas has some of the best night skies in the country.

Too much light pollution to see stars? Watch the moon and the planets. Or drive south about 15 miles into the country. If you are an urbanite find an astronomy club to stargaze with. http://www.astronomyclubs.com/

How to use a sky wheel, a planisphere

http://lawrencehallofscience.org/starclock/skywheel.html

TOO MUCH SQUASH

Blossom Time

You might prepare them the way Diana Kennedy suggests, when writing in The Cuisines of Mexico about going  “…very early on Sunday mornings in October to the Xochimilco market to buy roses and plants for the terrace of our apartment and finding the new shoots of the zucchini plant, still with the flowers and half-formed little squash on them.  I would steam them all together and then eat them with butter and pepper.”

Stop squash production by picking the male flowers, the long stemmed ones. Make sure a bee isn’t sleeping in a curled blossom. Store them in a plastic bag in the fridge. Blow air into the bag so the blossoms are floating. When ready to use cut the squash blossoms up and sprinkle them in salads, or in quesadillas. Stuff them with cheese, dip them in egg and flour and fry them.

The Bee, The Blossom and the Beginning of Civilization at

http://www.farmstandmarfa.net/?p=122

BRIGHT WINGS

An anthology of poems about birds, edited by Billy Collins, illustrated with watercolors by David Allen Sibley.
Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and Sylvia Plath and many more.
Eamonn Grennan’s “On a 3 oz. Lesser Yellowlegs,
Departed Boston August 28, Shot Martinique September 3.”
Henry Carlile on the cardinal “He shocks us when he flies / like a red verb over the
snow.”

FarmStandMarfa RECYCLING
HAIR BOOMS VS CONVENTIONAL BOOMS SOAKING OIL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W68L53WkIAw

Here hair boom is compared to conventional boom in this demo done in the Bayou during the Gulf Spill 2010. We hope you’ll enjoy this little film about our charity’s “Oil Spill Hair Mats Program” The music is “Canan Nan Gaidheal” by Scottish

FOOD

HEALTHY SALAD DRESSING

Boost the omega-3s in your diet.

Add a Tb of flax oil to the olive oil in your salad dressing. Increase the citrus or vinegar so that the flax does not dominate. I like to use yuzu juice, a citrus fruit, indispensable in Japanese cooking. Create your own by mixing grapefruit, tangerine and lemon juices.

ECOGARDEN

NATIVE PLANT ORGANIZATIONS protect and nurture our native pollinators. You can too. Plant a Native bee garden. That little green creature in the garden you think is a fly…it’s a sweat bee.

Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute in Fort Davis, Texas

CDRI Native Bee Garden workshop June 12

http://cdri.org/

Native Plant Society of Texas http://npsot.org/

To find other native plant organizations that encourage the preservation and use of native plants in different regions of the country visit http://www.wildflower.org/organizations/

ECO BLAST

One initiative can make a transformative difference.

Over ten million acres of roadsides can be a resource for pollinator conservation. Plant them native. Defeat the chemicals and invasive exotics. Cut down on mowing. Rainwater run-off collects on the roadsides and waters the plants. Connect fragmented habitats with roadside plantings.

http://www.xerces.org/pollinator-conservation-roadsides/

BE YOUR OWN FARMER

from our friends at Sunnyside Organic Seedlings
http://www.organic.biz/

Pilar at Sunnyside in Richmond, CA. They grow heirloom seeds!