Our venders are busy growing and preparing a new selection of foods, plants, and products for your outdoor shopping experience.

Friends of Falls Park Farmers Market, a group of market shoppers, are planning many exciting activities. Check back often. Which local musicians will be performing? What entertainers are coming to Market? What topics will be discussed at the Table Talk? Who will be present from the Master Gardener program to help solve your gardening dilemma?

Here are two really good recipes to tie up the end.

Pumpkin Spice or Apple Bread ~ Georgia Totten

 1-2/3 c. all-purpose flour; 1 tsp baking soda; ¾ tsp cinnamon; ¼ tsp ginger; ¼ tsp ground cloves; ¼ plus 1/8 tsp kosher salt; 1-1/3 c granulated sugar; 1/3 cup canola or other good vegetable oil; 1 cup plus 1-½ TBS canned unsweetened pumpkin; 1 large egg and ¾ cup coarsely chopped walnuts or pecans.

 Mix oil, egg and pumpkin with an electric mixer until well blended, then add the egg and blend.  Stir the dry ingredients together then combine with the wet until combined.  Do not over beat.  Add nuts and bake at 350 degrees for one hour, 5 minutes for a standard loaf pan or 35 minutes for mini-loaves.  **Note-I find the mini loaf pans work best.  The standard loaf size doesn’t bake in the top middle as well as the smaller size. 

For the apple cake, use the same ingredients, but substitute a pint of homemade or canned apple pie filling and reduce the sugar to ¾ cup, breaking up any large pieces of the homemade apple pieces with a fork or a knife.  If the pie filling has a good amount of liquid, you may want to increase the flour to 2 cups.  A streusel topping made from rubbing ¼ cup sugar with 2 TBS of butter sprinkled over the top before baking makes a nice presentation.  Omit the nuts and bake the same as the pumpkin loaves.   

With our long run of cool, dry days, now is naturally the prime time to get the yard and garden cleaned up and ready for next year, time to think about putting in more daffodil bulbs, or even a few new plants (who can pass up flowering vines on clearance?). The extended forecast appears to be favorable, so there is probably still time to get them established if one plants in the next few days.  Water consistently until we get a hard freeze, then mulch and hope they have ample time to set roots and survive the winter.  It’s always a gamble, but the odds appear to be in their favor this year.

 This is also a good time of year to dry or press any flowers you might want to save.  Just about any fresh, non-fleshy flower can be dried for use over the winter for use as indoor arrangements, or pressed for crafts.  Many will dry right on the plant, such as hydrangea, rose hips, yarrow and astilbe, while others may be lain carefully on a bed of powdered borax (yep, old 20-Mule Team; look for it in the detergent booster isle) then covered completely with more borax and left for several weeks (a disposable roasting pan is a good and inexpensive container to use and re-use for this purpose, and the borax can be re-used, as well).  Pressed flowers, leaves and thin twigs look nice arranged on the sides of plain or colored pillar candles (rub the back of a heated spoon (careful, as the handle will also be hot-foam pencil holders help here, as does keeping them sitting atop a electric skillet on low) to slightly melt the area where you want to attach the piece so it will stick. It will cool quickly and your decoration will stay in place.  Once the candle is completed, dip it into melted paraffin to set (melt the paraffin in a 1-lb coffee can in a pot of simmering water. A pair of pliers to clasp the wick is handy for the process).  This is obviously not a craft for children!   However, children will most certainly enjoy creating their own landscapes or greeting cards with pressed leaves and flowers, and good old white school glue works just great for these.  Simply remove the stems and press leaves and petals whole or separately in a book or magazine and add weights until dry, usually a month or so.  This is an especially fun craft for those cold indoor months when children are looking for something out of the ordinary to do. Older children may enjoy working with the more delicate petals with the use of a pair of tweezers for careful placement.  Young children will have fun with simple, easy to handle fall leaves.

Here are a few additional quick decorating ideas to enhance the autumn season:  Hollow out a pumpkin (poke a few drainage holes in the bottom) and set a pot of mums inside, tip the top decoratively near the base and accent with gourds and autumn berries.  And don’t forget the clear twinkle lights!  One can drill some around the pumpkin and put the lights inside the holes around the plant for added fun (my daughter did this for her October wedding (ten years on the 20^th—happy anniversary!).  I recently kept a smoky blue pumpkin I found at the Market over the entire winter placed on a tray with miniature lights and just changed the fall foliage to evergreen and pinecones as the season progressed.

Finally, I just have to add how proud I am of Sioux Falls, and especially of the great improvements over the past decade to Falls Park.  Last week I showed this off to my sister and brother-in-law, visiting from Indiana, and I could not have been prouder.  The beautiful weather was a bonus, of course, and the falls were running well despite our lack of rain.  We took the trolley, snapped a photo for a visiting European couple, rode the trolley and visited some shops downtown; one can so easily overlook that which is right in the backyard, and I recommend a trip to the Falls Park if it’s been awhile.  You will come away pleased, especially if you combine it with a trip to the Market in these last few weeks.

As summer’s harvest phases out, fall’s harvest is coming in! Keep an eye out for pumpkins and butternut and acorn squash. And don’t forget about the non-seasonal goodies you can find at the market as well, like meats, baked goods, coffee and many others!

So make sure you come down to the Falls Park Farmer’s Market this Saturday from 8am to 1pm.