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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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