Just like that, we’re through the portal of the longest daylight of the year. Summer solstice season graced us with some really sweet, long sunny days punctuated by big summer rains. We’ve been powering through the waves of main season planting ahead of ripening summer fruits, harvesting the last of the spring crops, and planning for fall plantings (which we’ll start seeding for sooner than you’d think). We had some wonderful work-traders and friends at the farm last week to help us plant out our winter squash, pull the last of the garlic scapes, and bless the fields together with a solstice fire. We’ll have zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, and lots of summer herbs soon enough, but for now we’re savoring the hearty cruciferous vegetables of the cooler, early summer temperatures, before the heat fully takes over. Farming is a dance of constantly collaborating with, strategizing around, and sometimes despairingly accepting the ever-changing and often unpredictable patterns in weather, ecological balance, and human economies. We do our adaptive best, one day, one week at a time.

This week, we’re harvesting some beautiful napa and red cabbages, and I think it’s an early summer vegetable that’s under-appreciated. Apparently, the writers & editors at Vogue agree, and proclaimed 2026 the year of the cabbage. I can’t read the article behind its pay wall, but I do think every year should be a year of cabbage. All of our leafy and cruciferous vegetables can be prepared in a myriad of delicious ways, and boast impressive nutrient profiles, but cabbage in particular is rich in many essential vitamins and phytonutrients that are protective to the human body. This includes vitamins C, A & K, manganese, B vitamins, calcium, potassium, tryptophan, protein and magnesium. Cabbage is the highest in glutamine of the cruciferous vegetables.

The sulfur-containing compounds found in cabbage and other brassicas (as well as alliums, mustards, radishes, and turnips) support the human body’s endogenous production of glutathione, which is a powerful antioxidant and an important mitigator of oxidative stress. It is a compound that the liver utilizes to process the toxic products of alcohol metabolism. Replenishing glutathione swiftly and regularly, with the help of food sources of sulfur-containing amino acids, lessens the negative impacts of stress and alcohol on the body, improves metabolism, and boosts energy. There is an old witches’ tale, (backed by a bit of science) that if you eat more sulfur-containing foods on a day you’re consuming alcohol, you’re less likely to experience a hangover the following day. Ask my bother-in-law {affectionate} about “cresc’s cabbage cups”. The trick works.

All of the brassicas you may be familiar with – broccoli, cauliflower, kale, romanesco, kohlrabi, collards, brussel sprouts – are cultivars of the same species of wild cabbage, Brassica oleraceae. We’ve had a few of these the past few weeks with our green & purple kohlrabi and ColdCo’s caulilini, broccolini & spigarello. Our napa cabbage and red cabbage are the most recent brassicas on the farm store scene, and we hope you savor it as much as we are. Cabbage is a staple in food cultures around the world, and is one of the oldest vegetable cultivars in the human diet. The variety of delicious preparations of cabbage across cultures is too numerous to count, and it can be eaten fresh, fermented, or cooked in myriad ways. Whether you’re making kimchi, sauerkraut, slaw, stuffed cabbage rolls, charred salads, braised vegetables – cabbage brings the vessel for flavor, sustenance, probiotics, nutrients, antioxidants, crunch, color, and more.

I’ll get off my soapy cabbage box and leave you to dream into some crisp & refreshing summer cabbage preparations. My pitch is simple: Enjoy cabbage as many ways as you can before it’s too hot for it again, until fall. Don’t rush it out the door for summer vegetables too soon, and don’t forget to ferment some for later, though it is also a storage crop that will keep well in the fridge for weeks.

Our ordering window is open for weekly Thursday pickups – place your order anytime before Tuesdays at 7PM. As a reminder, you can re-up your farm store credits at any time, to use to purchase your produce. Use the discount code BEWILD10 when purchasing farm credits, to take 10% off your total payment. In addition to our cabbage, kohlrabi, greens, herbs, bouquets & other recent staples, we’ve got some red new potatoes from our friends at John Paul’s Farm. New potatoes are the early summer harvest of young potatoes and are best eaten soon after harvest. They are creamy and delicious with delicate skins. You may refrigerate them to prolong their freshness, but probably, you’ll want to eat them this week!

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We’ve got a heat wave coming, and the cabbage is ready just in time to clear it before the temperatures jump to the 90s. If I’m being perfectly honest, it’s a bit maddening farming with commitments to ecologically sound practices in a decade of rapidly escalating climate chaos, while the billionaire death cults of consumerism attempt to threaten water sources across the country & push us over the point of no-return with global warming.

In between updating our listings & checking the weather forecast for the week, I see news of a new mega frack-powered data center being pushed to permit just an hour east of where we farm (& very near where several of our friends farm) & watch a video from a farm somewhere in the midwest that lost all of their crops to a 2 hour storm that flooded & then iced their fields with hail in the middle of June. Meanwhile, the forecast for this week looks worse every time I look at it, with a heat dome about to envelop half the country. How many people know how much water it takes to get food crops to survive near 100 degree temperatures for days on end? How bout the crop protection strategies for sub freezing temperature on either side of a spring heat wave?

Resource management is tipping way over the precarious balancing point to incoming crisis escalation, all around the globe. I don’t put words to this to rage bait or induce fear, but to attempt to ground more collectively in reality. We do our best to focus on what we can realistically impact & adjust, but we can’t control the weather or the municipal water supply we are dependent on to grow food. We just have to keep adapting, one wave at a time.

I hope you’ll savor some of the delicious food we’re pulling from the fields before the heat wave, as we continue to try to sustain each other, one month at a time.

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As always, thank you for your support of our wild agricultural endeavors, which sustain us all in many more ways than nutritional sustenance. May the long summer light and abundant harvests carry us through all the hard work and shapes of change ahead of us in the coming months. Stay cool out there, however you can.

Happy solstice season,

xxxxx

crescent

summer solstice reflections & a case for cabbages