We had our best-ever sales day at the Saint Croix Falls Farmer’s Market this week, the boxes are packed to the brim with tomatoes, we couldn’t even fit everything inside so there are melons on the side – this is Peak Produce season.

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We’ve been smoking vegetables (in the Frankensmoker, not in a pipe), roasting onions and canning salsa and basking in the rare and precious beauty of a summer without mosquitoes and taking kids and dogs and farmers and helpers to the creek, and we’ve been looking for blackberries and finding less blackberries and searching for chokecherries and wild grapes but finding neither and hunting for mushrooms and finding lobster mushrooms and we’ve been pulling out some weeds and letting other weeds get happily overgrown and writing this sentence.

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It’s been good. I don’t know anything more about the future than I did this spring, but summertime just reminds one that it’s quite OK.

The sunshine is a powerful thing, and the summertime food reflects it too.

Inside Box 11

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• Tomatoes – At last, the massively-laden vines inside the high tunnel have decided to change their fruit from greens to reds. Or oranges. Or even to different shades of green, in certain cases (if you got a green tomato, it’s ripe, or damn close,
• a Melon – ok that’s not actually inside the box but whatever. You probably have a perfectly-ripe cantaloupe (eat it eat it eat it before you risk living with the regret of a mushy mucky overripe fruitfly hotel), but maybe you got a watermelon or a Lily or a honeydew. Cut it up, eat some, store the rest in the fridge for later.
• Edamame or Tomatillos or Okra – if you’re not sure what to do with yours, we can help
• Cucumbers – they’re almost done for the season. Some farms plant “succession crops” weekly, so that their fields produce a constant stream of cucumbers throughout the season. We feel like there are wonderful times both to have and not to have cucumbers.
• an Eggplant – Asian or Italian style
• Kohlrabi – it is simple to peel and slice them up to eat raw with a little salt & pepper.
• Zucchini – ain’t done yet.
• Cherry Tomatoes – a few pints of mixed Sun Golds and Jasper and/or Purple Bumblebee.
• Beets – Our first planting of beets did terribly but the second one did well enough and this is them. If you boil or roast them first, the skins will then slip off , no need to pre-peel.
• Sweet Corn – It’s a different variety than last week – we staggered the planting of different types but somehow they still came ready barely a week apart. Which do you prefer? (PS This will be the last sweet corn for the year.)