We’ve had a glorious week after the long-awaited rain on Tuesday evening when the ground finally got a little drink after a month with no moisture. With the shift in the weather, we got a welcome break from the punishing temperatures. Our intrepid crew has been starting every day at 7am to be able to beat the heat and pick veggies in the early morning when they are at their best condition, but we’ve enjoyed some 8am start times in the past few days!

After the daily morning harvest, we head back into the rows to weed for a few hours, then after lunch we tie up our rambunctiously vining tomatoes. Like many growers in Wisconsin, we have seen significant early signs of blight, probably as a result of the ultra-wet conditions in early June. The plants are loaded with fruit, however, so we are hoping to reap a ton before the plants succumb. So far we’ve only got the first few ripe ones for the box. The hot dry conditions we've been experiencing are the best thing for keeping the blight in check, so our fingers are crossed.

Hot dry conditions weren’t the best for most of the other things on the farm, however. We have the entire farm under irrigation (drip tape) but artificial watering will just never support a plant the way rain will. Many of our crops are starting to show stress from the prolonged dry period and aren’t bouncing back from cuttings the way we expect, though the recent rain has helped.  As a result, we have fewer greens for you this week than we’d like – we had less Swiss chard and beans than we should have, so we had to split those between Shorties and Fulls. But we’ve got a lovely harvest of sorrel – also known as “summer lettuce” – whose deep perennial roots have been able to reach farther for moisture than many of our annual crops. And we are very much enjoying the bumper crop of summer squash for crew lunch every day. Hope you like them, too!

Basil: Oh, there is so much more to come, but this is just the first little taste of the basil. Store in a cool spot OUTSIDE of the fridge. Keep closed in the plastic and use quickly. Rinse in a cold sink of water just before using. Sprinkle on pizza, mozzarella salad, bruschetta.

Radicchio: (Full Shares Only) Our head lettuce and salad is on break for a few weeks while we nurture along the new rows in the shade. These bitter greens may look like lettuce, but they are an Italian open-leaf variety of radicchio that is wonderful grilled. So it’s the perfect time to heat that grill up outside in the sunshine – while you’ve got it hot you can also marinate some summer squash and zucchini and sear that up, too! See our Farmer Kriss Pinterest page for some great instructions.

Tomatoes: These, too, are just getting rolling. For this week, we have two heirlooms for the Shortie Shares and a bag of pretty cherries and currants for the Full Size. We’ll get you more soon!

Swiss Chard: (Shortie Shares Only) Enjoy raw or cooked.

Zucchini and Summer Squash: You’ve got a big and some smalls in your box. All are good eaten fresh with dips, sauteed in coconut, grilled with olive oil or shredded into breads and cakes. But try making raw pasta with your veggie peeler!

Baby Kale and Collards: These lovely baby leaves are tender enough to use for a fresh salad, but flavorful enough to use for cooking. The best way to enjoy kale as a salad is to cut it in thin ribbons, then massage it (really, mash it with your hand) in the dressing 15 minutes before you plant to eat. We planted 5 different varieties of kale this year because our members have been telling us how much they love kale. Enjoy!

Lemon Balm (bunched with chocolate mint and lovage): This bright-tasting herb is a favorite for us in the summer. Add to lemonade, iced tea or chiffonade into your salad. This is terrific chopped and added to goat cheese or a quick bread recipe. Wonderful in shortbread cookies. This week, you can add the lemon balm to your basil and make a tart fresh pesto! Find a cookie and a salad dressing recipe on the Farmer Kriss Pinterest page.

Chocolate Mint: Just what you need to beat the heat! Add to lemonade, slice thinly over fruit salad, make mojitos. Store in an inch of water in the fridge until you are ready to use.

Sorrel (bagged): You asked for it, you got it – more sorrel! This is a great stand-in for lettuce for fresh salads, and since lettuce is on hiatus until the heat pulls back a bit, now is a great time to experiment with more fresh eating ideas. In fact, sorrel is sometimes called “Summer Salad.” We’ve given you lots of new recipe ideas.

Lovage: Both the leaves and stems of this perennial celery are useful when you need celery in a recipe – which is often this time of year.

Cucumber: Lovely and crisp. The flavor of these is so good try chopping and eating as a plain salad with just rice wine vinegar and chunky sea salt. Mmmmm. A little chopped lemon balm and you’ve got a very special little side dish!

Eggplant: Our plants are loaded with flowers and little fruits, but we did harvest enough yesterday for all the Full Size shares to get one eggplant. Yours may be purple, green, white or pink. They may be long, skinny or round and fat. All are ripe and ready to use, we’ve just grown a lot of different varieties.

String Beans: Just a handful left on the plants, but they are sooooo good we wanted to get you a few. The flavor is exceptional, so try just lightly sauteeing in olive oil and lemon juice, season with salt and pepper, and eat while quite al dente. Do forgo boiling!

Flower Bouquets: My goodness, these were a ball to harvest! We’ve got some of everything here – flowers, seed pods and buds – from both the garden and the wild fields. You will notice a lot of amazing smells, too – the sweet perfume of purple Buddleia and the medicinal mint of lilac Monarda or bee balm. Full size bouquets have the frilly pods of hazelnuts and the Shorties shares have berries from viburnums. The greens for the bouquets are asparagus gone to seed!

Hot! That’s what it’s been this week. Our intrepid crew has started every day at 7am to be able to beat the heat and pick veggies in the early morning when they are at their best condition. If we say so ourselves, everything does look quite nice in the box in spite of the abuse the plants take at the top of the day.

After the morning harvest every day, we head back into the rows to weed for a few hours, then after lunch we tie up our rambunctiously vining tomatoes. Like many growers in Wisconsin, we have seen significant early signs of blight, as a result of the ultra-wet conditions in early June. If you can remember that far back to before it was so hot and dry, we flooded so many times out here our road was closed on three separate occasions! The plants are loaded with fruit, however, so we are hoping to reap a ton before the vines succumb to the various foliar diseases. The hot dry conditions we are experiencing now are the best thing for keeping the blight in check, so our fingers are crossed.

Here on the farm, we are trying to end every work day by 2pm so as to get out of the sun before the heat advisories. So far, so good: our crew is healthy and in good spirits, in spite of a few mild cases of heat stroke. The sum total of all that heat is a wonderful bounty of summer’s earliest treats: basil, squash, chard and cukes. Enjoy!

Basil: Oh, there is so much more to come, but this is just the first little taste of the basil. Store in a cool spot OUTSIDE of the fridge. Keep closed in the plastic and use quickly. Sprinkle on pizza, mozzarella salad, bruschetta.

Radicchio: Our head lettuce and salad is on break for a few weeks while we nurture along the new rows in the shade. These bitter greens may look like lettuce, but they are an Italian open-leaf variety of radicchio that is wonderful grilled. So it’s the perfect time to heat that grill up outside in the sunshine – while you’ve got it hot you can also marinate some summer squash and zucchini and sear that up, too! See our Farmer Kriss Pinterest page for some great instructions.

Swiss Chard: This is what we are using for fresh salads these days, mixed in with baby kale and collards. With a texture like spinach and the delicate sweetness of beets, this is a very versatile cooking green as well. Alice Water’s Chard Gratin is always a favorite with our members. See it on theBox 4 Recipe page.

Baby Kale and Collards: These lovely baby leaves are tender enough to use for a fresh salad, but flavorful enough to use for cooking. The best way to enjoy kale as a salad is to cut it in thin ribbons, then massage it (really, mash it with your hand) in the dressing 15 minutes before you plant to eat. We planted 5 different varieties of kale this year because our members have been telling us how much they love kale. Enjoy!

Calendula Confetti: We planted these lovely calendulas and johnny jump-ups to add to our salad mixes, but they are just now flowering. So use this sprinkled on top of a salad, or garnish a cold cucumber salad or bean side dish.

Broccoli: (Full Size only) We are really a bit embarrassed to pack these. Our spring broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage really took a beating in the heat and mostly flowered before it was of harvest-able size. Our shade-covered greenhouse is full of fall brassicas however, and we are confident you’ll get lots of beautiful cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, brussels sprouts and napa come September.

Lemon Balm (bunched with chocolate mint): This bright-tasting herb is a favorite for us in the summer. Add to lemonade, iced tea or chiffonade into your salad. This is terrific chopped and added to goat cheese or a quick bread recipe. Wonderful in shortbread cookies. This week, you can add the lemon balm to your basil and make a tart fresh pesto! Find a cookie and a salad dressing recipe on the Farmer Kriss Pinterest page.

Chocolate Mint: Just what you need to beat the heat! Add to lemonade, slice thinly over fruit salad, make mojitos. Store in an inch of water in the fridge until you are ready to use.

Sorrel: You asked for it, you got it – more sorrel! This is just a little bag – add to salad or chop into your sautéed summer squash recipes. Look on the recipe blog for more ideas.

Cucumber: Lovely and crisp. The flavor of these is so good try chopping and eating as a plain salad with just rice wine vinegar and chunky sea salt. Mmmmm. A little chopped lemon balm and you’ve got a very special little side dish!

Zucchini and Summer Squash: You’ve got a big and some smalls in your box. All are good eaten fresh with dips, sautéed in coconut, grilled with olive oil or shredded into breads and cakes. But try making raw pasta with your veggie peeler! Recipe on the Farmer Kriss Pinterest page.

String Beans: There’s nothing quite like a fresh-from-the-field green bean. We picked these for you on Thursday, so it’s almost as good as growing them yourself. The flavor is exceptional, so try just lightly sautéing in olive oil and lemon juice, season with salt and pepper, and eat while quite al dente. Do forgo boiling!

Peas: (Shortie Shares Only) Snap peas hate the heat, so alas, this is the last little bag from this year’s crop. We’ve been slicing and adding to salads.

Cinnamon Basil Transplants: We are about to plant our final succession of basil here at the farm and this is a good time for you to put another plant in, too. These cinnamon basil plants are prolific, sweet, spicy and terrific in Thai dishes. Harvest a few leaves from the top of the bush every few days and you’ll find you have a big bush plant producing a ton of basil for you in a few weeks.

So the main thing happening on the farm this week is BUGS. Holy moly, it’s a big crazy mess of gnats and mosquitos out there! Luckily, these are not the sort of bugs that eat plants. Kudos to our fine crew for fighting the no-see-ums to put together this week’s box. We’ve got the first tastes of the summer season for you – squash and chard and green beans, hooray!

Thanks for all the great feedback on the milkweed! Sounds like we’ve got a wonderful adventurous membership this year. Those of you who loved the milkweed can certainly find more somewhere near you. But also look now for the big white umbels of elderberry blossoms! These are great for making fried fritters, which taste like flowery funnel cakes. Check out this recipe. Also available now are terrific orange daylilies – pick both flowers and buds, known as “Golden Needles” in Chinese cuisine  – and saute like this.

Head Lettuce: Our salad mixes have petered out here in the sun, but we did have some perky head lettuces still growing in the shady edges of the gardens. Use these to create your own unique salad mix with some of the herbs and other greens we’ve included in the box.

Minutina: Since we had no more salad mix, we wanted to give you a bunch of fun ingredients you could mix up yourself. These ferny little heads of skinny greens are an English garden green that will enliven your salad. Or use it to create a bed for grains.

Calendula Confetti: Yep, you read that right – flower petal confetti. These are wonderful tossed over a salad, or used to decorate a cake or to garnish a stir fry. We grew these to put in our salad mix, but they just started to flower now that our salad mix is done. So have fun deploying it yourself!

Swiss Chard: Our first harvest through these rows! Chard this young is sweet like baby beets (to which they are related) and tender like lettuce. Use these as salad, wilt lightly, bake in a gratin or throw into your omelette.

Summer Squash/Zucchini: It’s awful early for these guys to be producing, but we transplanted them in that first hot week of June and they got the message to get fruiting. So here we are! Those of you with big ones can make a cake or bread, but you should also plan to slice some and sautée with olive oil and some brewer’s yeast. We had a great saute for lunch with summer squash, milkweed pods and snap peas in coconut and sesame oil with soy sauce.

Peas:  We’ve got snows and snaps bagged up for you this week. Frankly, they hardly ever make it into any sort of pot here, since we eat them raw like candy. But they are even better if you can hold yourself back and sauté them lightly just til they turn a bit darker. Remember to remove the strings down the side before you eat or prepare.

Cucumber: Full size only. These are very early in the boxes this year because we actually grew them in our brand new hoop house. You should come see it actually – they are growing up strings and it is soooo cool! So easy to pick, too! There will be lots more to come. Oh, and in between the cukes, we’re growing mini yellow watermelons.

Herb Bags (bagged): Chives, dill (just a few pieces) and cilantro. These should keep for a while in plastic in the fridge, but the cilantro and dill should definitely be used before the chives.

Oregano (bunched): You can use this fresh for a few days and then hang the whole bunch up to dry and crumble it up to store.

Cauliflower: You’ve gotten a few tiny cauliflower heads. These are small and strange, frankly, but they are soooo picky in the spring we should really stop growing them in the early season. They don’t like up and down temperatures and we’ve got just too much of that. Our greenhouse is full of starts for the fall crop and those will be wonderful.

Green Beans: There is nothing quite like a green been freshly picked from the garden. Cook just lightly.

Rhubarb: The second and last harvest of the summer. Yum! Now you can try all the recipes that your fellow Farm Members sent in on the Box 3 recipe blog. See the Farmer Kriss pinterest page for more ideas.

Horseradish: Yum! We dug this hot stuff just in time to liven up your brat cookouts in steamy July. Take the messy root section we’ve cut for you, peel it, cut it into 1-inch chunks and whisk it around in your food processor with about 1/4 cup water. BEWARE. When you take the lid off the food processor, it will sting your eyes! Stand back. When the horseradish is grated fine, remove from processor and drain through cloth in a colander. Add about 1 tablespoon vinegar and a pinch of salt and store in the fridge until the end of the summer. Need more reassurance? Check out the pics on the pinterest page.

Flower Bouquet: We had to skip flowers for the last boxes because we didn’t have room with all the fluffy salad and braising mixes, but here is a little bouquet squeezed in so you can enjoy the first summer blossoms: lots of yellow Yarrow, dramatic golden Armenian Basket Flowers, native False Indigo greens, red leaves of Ninebark Diablo, blue Balloon Flowers (full size only)  and my favorite flower of the year : the little chartreuse Bupleurum. Strip the leaves off the bottom of the stems before you put them in water, and enjoy!

Transplants: Parcel and Cinnamon Basil: This tiny little bag of plants includes Cinnamon Basil – excellent in Thai cuisine and in dessert! The smaller, greener plant, Parcel,  is an experiment for us this year. It is a cross between parsley and celery that is supposed to make the problems associated with those two plants less troublesome. Parsley is so necessary all year, but it fades in the heat. Celery is so yummy with summer stuff, but it takes all year to stalk up and we only harvest it in the fall. So this is basically a cutting green that tastes like both that is supposed to be harvestable all season. Plant it and tell us what you think!

What a glorious week we’ve had here on the farm! No floods, no drought, no difficult weather of any kind – just cool mornings, temperate afternoons and lots and lots of beautiful views. Absolutely gorgeous views, in fact. This week we took the crew off-site to forage in our neighbor’s prairie for milkweed pods and took the opportunity to check out what natives were blooming. If you’ve got a prairie nearby, do go see it soon while all the yellows are still blooming. When our farm membership was smaller, we used to forage a lot for the boxes. We are too big now to spend that kind of time in the woods (you long-term members will remember chickweed, nettle, watercress, elderberry flowers and daylily buds), but I still do keep my eyes out for all the tasty things that pop up in the hedgerows. If you like the milkweed, you can certainly find more somewhere near you. But also look now for the big white umbels of elderberry blossoms! These are great for making fried fritters, which taste like flowery funnel cakes, a treat which we will indulge in this weekend. Check out this recipe. We did pack a lot of awesome stuff for you this week, though! Here’s what’s In The Box. Use the first things first.

Head Lettuce: Our salad mixes have petered out here in the sun, but we did have some perky head lettuces still growing in the shady edges of the gardens. Use these to create your own unique salad mix with some of the herbs and other greens we’ve included in the box.

Minutina: Since we had no more salad mix, we wanted to give you a bunch of fun ingredients you could mix up yourself. These ferny little heads of skinny greens are an English garden green that will enliven your salad. Or use it to create a bed for grains.

Summer Squash: It’s awful early for these guys to be producing, but we transplanted them in that first hot week of June and they got the message to get fruiting. So here we are! Just a few tender yellow and green squash, but they are just terrific sliced thin and sautéed with olive oil and some brewer’s yeast.

Cilantro: Very fragile. Use it up!

Milkweed Blossoms: Those of you who’ve been with our farm for a few years know how much we like edible flowers and foraging. These early summer treats combine the best of both! The un-flowered buds from milkweed stalks can be used in several ways, but definitely don’t eat them raw. Our favorite way is to simply sauté lightly with garlic wok oil, season with soy sauce and serve over rice. Peas and broccoli would also be great in the mix. But you can also boil them for a few minutes and add to quiche. Farm Member Isabella says the quiche recipe on our pinterest page and recipe blog is terrific!

Peas:  We’ve got snows and snaps bagged up for you this week. Frankly, they hardly ever make it into any sort of pot here, since we eat them raw like candy. But they are even better if you can hold yourself back and sauté them lightly just til they turn a bit darker. Remember to remove the strings down the side before you eat or prepare.

Cucumber: These are very early in the boxes this year because we actually grew them in our brand new hoop house. You should come see it actually – they are growing up strings and it is soooo cool! So easy to pick, too! There will be lots more to come. Oh, and in between the cukes, we’re growing mini yellow watermelons.

Chives (bagged): These should keep for a while in plastic in the fridge.

Oregano and Dill (bunched): You can use this fresh for a few days and then hang the whole bunch up to dry and crumble it up to store.

Broccoli and Cauliflower: You’ve gotten some combination of broccoli and cauliflower heads. These are soooo picky in the spring we should really stop growing them in the early season – they don’t like up and down temperatures and we’ve got just too much of that. Our greenhouse is full of starts for the fall crop and those will be wonderful.

Garlic Scapes: Just a little taste of the garlicy goodness we’ll harvest in a few weeks. For now, chop these curly blooms up just like you would scallions enjoy the heat.

Rhubarb: The second and last harvest of the summer. Yum! Now you can try all the recipes that your fellow Farm Members sent in on the Box 3 recipe blog. See the Farmer Kriss pinterest page for more ideas.

Flower Bouquet: We had to skip flowers for the last box because we didn’t have room, but here is a little bouquet squeezed in so you can enjoy the first summer blossoms: lots of yarrow, wild quinine (white), native false indigo greens and my favorite flower of the year : the little chartreuse bupleurum!

Parcel Transplants: This tiny little bagged plant is an experiment for us this year. It is a cross between parsley and celery that is supposed to make the problems associated with those two plants less troublesome. Parsley is so necessary all year, but it fades in the heat. Celery is so yummy with summer stuff, but it takes all year to stalk up and we only harvest it in the fall. So this is basically a cutting green that tastes like both that is supposed to be harvestable all season. Plant it and tell us what you think!