The sun shines brilliant the golden autumn leaves of the Cottonwood tree. A storm hides the Sandia Mountains usually visible in the background.
Sunlight on cottonwood tree.
Though this photo doesn’t do the apricot tree justice (it’s a day or two before prime color), it has the most gorgeous fall color of all our fruit trees.
One of our fruit trees planted by the former owner of our place.
Jen was featured in yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal in an article called Healing Essentials. You may need to click on the link for a trial pass to read it. -Tree
Enjoy the incomparable taste of eggs grown from a backyard flock. These are no anemic store bought eggs. Our happy hens freely range with our goats, dining on grains, goat milk, bugs and weeds so their yolks are deep yellow to orange. The eggshells range in color from dark brown to pale pink. Gorgeous! $3.00 per dozen. Email us at orders@sunstoneherbs.com
Eggs for Sale
This year's garlic.
Clouds over our back fence.
Piggie!
Yucca blooming
The Rio Grande Valley Farmers Guild seeks an artist to create its logo. Guidelines are available here. If you are a logo artist, we’d love to see your work. – Jen (Treasurer of RGVFG)
About the Rio Grande Valley Farmers Guild
A new cooperative of family farms located in New Mexico’s fertile Rio Grande Valley. Our members are farms concentrated in Albuquerque’s historically agricultural South Valley, extending as far south as Socorro and north to Bernalillo.
One of our first projects as a cooperative is the Cereal Grains Project, making local and naturally cultivated whole grains and flours available to local markets, restaurants and direct to the families of New Mexico.
Organic junk food is still junk food. Flying in organic salmon from Chile does nothing to reduce the size of our carbon footprint. And, most importantly (for me), the USDA’s organic certification does nothing to ensure that animals are treated humanely and permitted to exercise normal behavior patterns. For example, “organically” raised animals in the US must have access to the outdoors, which could be, and often is, a small door in the side of a great broiler barn that leads to a 100-square-foot concrete yard.
Here is an article from the NY Times that is a must read for those who are trying to eat better but perhaps are unaware of the fact that food labeled organic is not necessarily better for you. -Tree
Eating Food That’s Better for You, Organic or Not
by Marc Bittman
March 21, 2009
In the six-and-one-half years since the federal government began certifying food as “organic,” Americans have taken to the idea with considerable enthusiasm. Sales have at least doubled, and three-quarters of the nation’s grocery stores now carry at least some organic food. A Harris poll in October 2007 found that about 30 percent of Americans buy organic food at least on occasion, and most think it is safer, better for the environment and healthier.
So I discovered on a recent book tour around the United States and Canada.
No matter how carefully I avoided using the word “organic” when I spoke to groups of food enthusiasts about how to eat better, someone in the audience would inevitably ask, “What if I can’t afford to buy organic food?” It seems to have become the magic cure-all, synonymous with eating well, healthfully, sanely, even ethically.
But eating “organic” offers no guarantee of any of that. And the truth is that most Americans eat so badly — we get 7 percent of our calories from soft drinks, more than we do from vegetables; the top food group by caloric intake is “sweets”; and one-third of nation’s adults are now obese — that the organic question is a secondary one. It’s not unimportant, but it’s not the primary issue in the way Americans eat.
Read the rest of the article here.
Nicholas Kristof ’s op-ed piece in today’s NY Times is a wake-up call to anyone who consumes animal products. From the article:
Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300…
… Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.
The peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America concluded last year that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise in antibiotic resistance. The article said that more antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population.
Read the entire piece here.
This article from the New York Times is a must-read for anyone who regularly wipes down their kid with antimicrobial hand sanitizers. Note especially what the article says about children who grow up on farms. -Tree
Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You
By Jane E. Brody
Published: January 26, 2009Ask mothers why babies are constantly picking things up from the floor or ground and putting them in their mouths, and chances are they’ll say that it’s instinctive — that that’s how babies explore the world. But why the mouth, when sight, hearing, touch and even scent are far better at identifying things?
When my young sons were exploring the streets of Brooklyn, I couldn’t help but wonder how good crushed rock or dried dog droppings could taste when delicious mashed potatoes were routinely rejected.
Since all instinctive behaviors have an evolutionary advantage or they would not have been retained for millions of years, chances are that this one too has helped us survive as a species. And, indeed, accumulating evidence strongly suggests that eating dirt is good for you.
In studies of what is called the hygiene hypothesis, researchers are concluding that organisms like the millions of bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with “dirt” spur the development of a healthy immune system. Several continuing studies suggest that worms may help to redirect an immune system that has gone awry and resulted in autoimmune disorders, allergies and asthma.
Read the rest of the article here.
A recent article in the Seattle-Post Intelligencer discusses how 2/3 of the honey consumed in the US is from China and often contaminated…
Honey Laundering: Tainted Product Still Slips Easily Into US
by Andrew SchneiderConcealing discoveries of contaminated imported honey is immoral, unethical and often illegal — and it happens far too often, U.S. honey producers say.
“It doesn’t take a wizard to determine whether there are bad things in the honey we handle, nor a hero to do what it takes to keep it from our food supply,” said Mark Brady, a Texas beekeeper who sits on the National Honey Board.
“If we buy Chinese honey, as we do far too often, we know it may contain chloramphenicol or some other antibiotic that is illegal in any food product,” said Brady, who produces about a million pounds of honey a year. “To find it and not report it is criminal.”
Two-thirds of the honey Americans consume is imported and almost half of that, regardless of what’s on the label, comes from China, the Seattle P-I reported last month.
The newspaper’s five-month investigation into honey laundering — the intentional mislabeling of the country of origin — found that tons of Chinese honey coming into the U.S. is tainted with banned antibiotics.
But when the contamination is discovered by the industry through internal testing, insiders say, federal health or customs officials are almost never notified, and the honey ends up being dumped back on the market.
Read the entire article here.
Since moving to New Mexico, I’ve encountered so many friendly, welcoming people that my faith in humanity, if it was every in peril, is consistently restored. I received many a warm welcome from other New Mexico herbalists, one of whom is Monica Rude of Desert Woman Botanicals who interestingly enough also landed in New Mexico from upstate New York.
She runs an herb farm and herbal product business along the Gila River in southern New Mexico. She teaches a range of classes and offers many wonderful herbal products. Check out her website www.desertwoman.net If you’re in the Albuquerque area and want to try out her products and meet her in person, come to La Montanita Coop’s Earth Day festival on April 27th. – Jen
Monica Rude
