Week 4 of Pekarek’s Produce Weekly Vegetable Subscription

I’m sure you’ve see it before where kids are better at technology than the parents… well we’ve been in that stage around here a time or two! So Michael (9) and I had an adventure in making a video on my phone this week that helped me decide that we definitely need to use our children more for making farm videos (not me)! In that light, Michael made a strawberry syrup in less than ten minutes this week and made a video to go along with it!
On The Farm
The heat that we’ve been having is going to make for a much shorter strawberry season than we would like, so the next week or two is all about the strawberries! It’s time for strawberries on your salad, in your smoothies, and on your pancakes! Picking strawberries is fun the first time or two, but I’m not sure the crew will mind a shorter picking season!

This week you will all receive a basil plant with your weekly vegetable subscription! This is something that you can use over and over again. Basil needs a really good sunny spot to grow. You can either put it in a larger pot OR plant it in a sunny part of the garden for the best results. To use it, you can cut the stem down to 2 or 3 inches, with 2 sets of leaves left. It will continue to regrow from their all season. You want to make sure you keep cutting those tops off to keep it from flowering.
As for basil’s uses, there are many! We usually dry a bunch of it down in the oven, so we can use it all year. Here’s my top 5 ways to use basil:
- Dry it down for use all year round!
- Top whole leaves onto pizza
- Finish pasta with thinly sliced leaves
- Blend it into sauces
- Chop it up in a salad
This Week’s Produce
Basil
Strawberries
Broccoli
Carrots
Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, Jacob, Margret, Michael, Lukas, and Grace