Folks, this wraps up our six-week Spring Share. Thank you for joining our short adventure! We are so glad to feed you. We hope you enjoy the rest of the summer, and find other sources of local food.
What can you expect next from us?
– You will be able to come to the farm for at least one u-pick of organic plum tomatoes. This usually occurs around Labor Day. We plan to have garlic and basil for sale too, so you can make tomato sauce. Maybe some red peppers as well.
– We expect to offer pop-up sales as these crops are ready: plum tomatoes, basil, garlic, #2 grade red bell peppers. Watch for emails from us. The pop-up sales are likely to occur in August and/or September, with delivery to a few sites in Madison, plus pickup here at the farm.
You can buy our produce at these local stores.
We are currently delivering zucchini, cucumbers, cabbage and greens locally. Soon we will add peppers, then watermelons. By fall and winter, we will have a full suit of storage crops like cabbage, carrots, beets, and other root crops.
– the Willy Street Coops
– the Vitruvian Farm store (sometimes)
– After October, Outpost Natural Foods in the Milwaukee area.
Looking for another CSA farm to join for summer or fall?
Try the FairShare CSA Coalition’s Farm Search page. The map is quite useful and you can filter by season.
This week’s cabbage
Cabbage harvest involves lots of throwing. From right, Ken and Pollo cut the cabbage and throw to Maggie. Maggie throws to Aly on the wagon. Simone drives and sets a steady pace. For bigger fields, we gather a larger team and use our field conveyer instead of throwing.
Veggie List & Veggie Notes
Week #6, July 3, 2025
– Weekly shares
– BiWeekly/ B group
Green cabbage, 1
Sugar snap peas, ~0.8 lb
Zucchini &/or yellow squash, ~4 lb
Cucumbers, 5 – 6
Fennel, 1 or 2 bulbs, with fronds
Kohlrabi, 1 medium bulb
Lacinato kale, 1 bunch
Scallions, 1 bunch
Basil, 1 or 2 sprigs
Green cabbage – We grew ‘Farao’ variety for you. It is a delightful salad cabbage, good for slaw.
Storage: Refrigerate.
Fennel (bulbs and lacy fronds) – Fennel is a ‘swing vegetable’; it can be used raw or cooked. Clean well and slice as thinly as possible for use in raw salads. It is good simply prepared with olive oil, lime or lemon juice, salt and shaved parmesan cheese. Cooking softens and sweetens fennel, and mellows its anise flavor. Both the bulb and leaves are edible. Here are ideas from Alice Waters of Chez Panisse about how to use fennel: ‘It’s strong anise characteristic seems to suit fish particularly well. … We use fennel all the time. We add the feathery leaves to marinades for fish and to numerous salads, sauces and soups and we use them as a garnish, too. … The bulbs are sliced and served raw in salads in various combinations with other vegetables, parboiled for pastas; caramelized and served as a side dish; braised whole; or cooked in vegetable broths & fish stocks.”
Kohlrabi (pale green, round vegetable with thick skin and attached leaves) – Crunchy and sweet, kohlrabi is a great addition to salads.
Storage: Kohlrabi bulbs will store for a month in the refrigerator.
Uses: Kohlrabi are good peeled and eaten out of hand, or added to sandwiches, or added to salads. It makes a nice salad on it’s own. You can grate it, slice it, or cut it into matchsticks. It’s also good cooked.
Lacinato kale (bundle of grey-green textured leaves) – This is our most beautiful cooking green and a super food! Use like any kale.
Storage: Cover and refrigerate.
Basil (branched, leafy stalk) – Everyone gets one or two sprigs. Weekly members, it will be obvious to you that basil from this planting fared better than last week’s basil. Last week’s basil experienced too many temperature fluctuations, too much wind. This week’s basil is more tender. This stuff is fragile!
Storage: Basil deteriorates if stored in the refrigerator. It is best stored at room temperature with the cut ends in water, for example in a jar or vase. Treat it like a flower. Give the stem a fresh trim and change the water every day or two.
RECIPES by DEB
summer squash gratin with salsa verde
From smitten kitchen
In the notes for this recipe, Deb Perelman of smitten kitchen points out that although we refer to the yellow version as summer squash and the green version as zucchini, both are actually summer squash and can be used interchangeably. The salsa verde uses thyme, dried oregano or marjoram, mint, and flat leaf parsley. Since we have basil in the box I suggest subbing that in for the mint and some or all of the flat leaf parsley. Made with basil, the salsa verde will brown more quickly, but most of it is going into the gratin, where it won’t show. Store any leftover salsa verde with a thin layer of olive oil or a piece of saran wrap on the surface. If there is fennel in the box, it would be tasty sliced and sautéed and added to the gratin.
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Sushi Salad with Brown Rice, Avocado & Nori
From Alexandra’s Kitchen
Here is the first of two recipes for sushi salad, rice salads where some of the typical ingredients for sushi are tossed together as a salad rather than made into a roll. The recipe, from Alexandra’s Kitchen, includes nori, the seaweed that’s often used a wrapper for sushi rolls, but uses fewer of the veggies from this week’s box. You can sub sugar snaps for the edamame and regular cucumber, peeled and seeded, for the Persian cucumber called for.
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Scattered Sushi Salad
From Mollie Katzen
Scattered Sushi Salad from Mollie Katzen is probably more Americanized, but because it focuses on the rice, it’s preferred by anyone like me, who who thinks the rice is the best part of the sushi. You can also use more ingredients from our box for this one, cucumbers, summer squash, sugar snap peas, scallions, garlic scapes, finely sliced kale.
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Super-Simple Tangy Buttermilk Coleslaw Recipe
From Serious Eats
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This recipe recommends salting and draining your shredded cabbage before adding the dressing, which removes a lot of the liquid from the cabbage and prevents the dressing from getting watered down. Sliced scallions can replace the red onion.
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Basil Cucumber Salad
From Whole and Heavenly Oven
Creamy cucumbers with basil is slightly different than the usual seasoning of this salad, usually dill or no herbs at all. If you don’t have red onions, you could use scallions instead.
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Cold Cucumber Soup Recipe
From Love and Lemons
From the always-dependable Love & Lemons blog, this soup is an extremely elegant way to serve your cucumbers on a hot summer’s day. It calls for Persian cucumbers which are seedless; I recommend that you peel and seed our cukes. To seed cucumbers, cut them in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds with a spoon. There’s also both fresh dill, that we do not have in the box, and basil that we do, in the recipe. You could simply omit the dill or use dried dill – I suggest starting with 1/2 teaspoon and adding more to taste.
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Cheesy Zucchini Enchiladas
From DebsLunch Recipes
A mix of zucchini and summer squash cooked in olive oil is the filling for these enchiladas. A recipe for a tomato-y sauce is provided, as well as links to a ground chili-based enchilada sauce and a ranchero sauce. This recipe is very flexible and suggestions for additions to the filling are also provided.
