5-minute cucumber & zucchini summer salad

summer salads are back!

Leaving the farm for several days at the height of the growing season isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s always a mad dash to get everything irrigated, trellised, weeded and mowed, and then I need to coordinate with my team so they can keep up with all the farm chores while we’re away. But against all odds, last week our family packed our bags and snuck to the beach for a few days. Books were read, naps were taken, pina coladas were drunk, sunburns were acquired. It wasn’t easy, but it was so good (and so necessary) to get off the farm for a bit, even if it meant returning to a farm that immediately demanded my attention again, and I was thrown right back into that trellising, weeding, mowing, and harvesting grind.

What made coming home a bit easier was seeing that our basil is juuuuust about ready to harvest, which always signals the official start of summer for me. For all my fellow basil lovers, today I’m sharing a very quick (1 minute!) video tutorial on how to properly harvest basil. (Here’s the gist: don’t harvest one individual leaf at a time! Harvest by snipping the stems just *above* a node of new growth, which allows your basil plant to continue to grow and flourish all summer long.)

If you’re a visual learner like me, watch this video to see exactly what I mean:

(PS – Was this helpful? Do you have other gardening questions that I can tackle with a quick video tutorial? Let me know in the comments!)

And as usual, here’s a peak at what our regular CSA share members received in their boxes for this *final week* of the Spring CSA – lettuce, first of the zucchini (!), carrots, beets, sugar snap peas, and a tuscan herb bundle. Now we take a week “off” from the CSA so we can catch up on weeding, trellising, planting, etc – and then our 10-Week Summer CSA starts the first week of June. Summer, we’re (almost) ready for you!

Need some culinary inspiration for the weekend? Here’s my weekly round up of seasonal recipes from around Substack to help you eat like a farmer:

• Spinach Pesto Panini from

  Hetty Lui McKinnon
  /
  To Vegetables, With Love

• Warm Broccoli Chickpea Salad from

  Marian Bull
  /
  Mess Hall

• Burrata with Charred and Raw Sugar Snap Peas from

  deb perelman
  /
  the smitten kitchen digest

Keep reading for today’s recipe for 5-minute cucumber & zucchini summer salad, available for paid subscribers.

As much as I love leafy green salads, after eating endless bowls of leaves all spring, I’m ready for some crunch! color! variety!

This week our cucumbers and zucchini started coming in, finally giving me an excuse to jazz up my salad game. All week long I’ve been making this salad, which is basically thinly sliced raw cucumbers and zucchini, a diced avocado, some fresh basil, goat cheese, and pistachios dressed in a simple balsamic vinaigrette. Just like the recipe title says, this lovely little summer salad situation comes together in about 5 minutes – which is exactly the number of minutes I have to spare these days.

As written, this recipe makes a generous salad for one hungry person, but you can easily double/triple/quadruple it if you’re feeding more people. Pro tip – this salad is best eaten the day it’s made, as the avocado can turn a bit brown if it’s stored in the fridge.

If you’ve got any Memorial Day festivities planned this weekend, this salad would be an excellent addition to the menu. She’s crunchy, she’s colorful, she’s salty and creamy.. and nary a green leaf in sight! ;)

Keep reading for the full recipe (and a handy 1-page PDF for easy printing).

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5-Minute Cucumber & Zucchini Summer Salad

Serves 1