At peak right now: Tomatoes, Sweet Corn, Peaches, Watermelon, Blue Crab. Head to a farmers market or your CSA to find them fresh.
Sometime in late July you will stand at a farmers market booth with eight ears of Silver Queen in your hands and wonder if you should buy more. Buy more. Cut the kernels off the cob, spread them on a sheet pan to freeze individually, then transfer them to a bag, and you are done in fifteen minutes. Corn frozen this way in July tastes closer to August than anything in a grocery store freezer will in February. The same logic applies to blueberries from a pick-your-own operation like Larriland Farm in Woodbine or Butler's Orchard in Germantown. Rinse them, dry them, freeze them on the pan, bag them. No blanching, no processing, no equipment beyond what you already own.
Tomatoes are worth buying in bulk if you have any freezer space at all. A flat of seconds from a farm stand, the kind with split skins and irregular shapes that nobody wants to slice for a salad, will often run fifteen or twenty dollars and give you ten or twelve pounds of fruit. Blanch them briefly, slip the skins, and freeze them whole or crushed in quart containers. They collapse when they thaw and are fine for sauce, soup, or shakshuka in January. If you want to can them instead, you need jars, a pot, and a reliable recipe with added acid, which is a few hours of work but produces something shelf-stable for two years. Water bath canning is not complicated, but it does require following tested recipes exactly, and the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving is still the standard reference. Canning tomatoes whole or crushed, or turning them into a basic sauce before processing, gives you something different from frozen, more concentrated and ready to use straight from the jar.
Peaches from a Maryland orchard in August are one of the better arguments for putting food up. A half-bushel runs around twenty-five to thirty dollars at places like Baugher's in Westminster, which is a fraction of what you would pay for that volume by the pound. They freeze well halved and pitted with a little lemon juice to slow browning. They can well in a light syrup. They also make a fermented shrub if you steep the fruit in vinegar and sugar, which sounds fussy but takes ten minutes of actual work and keeps for months in the refrigerator.
Not everything rewards preservation. Cucumbers go soft when frozen and are only worth preserving as pickles. Zucchini freezes into mush unless you are shredding it for baked goods, and even then the texture changes enough that some people find it off. Lettuces and most salad greens are not worth the attempt. But spinach and kale blanch and freeze well, and they are worth doing if your CSA hits a week where the greens pile up faster than you can eat them. A two-minute blanch, cold water bath, squeeze out the moisture, and freeze in portions. You do not need to make a project of it.
A few producers worth knowing about this week.
The Mount Airy Farmers Market runs Wednesdays from 3 to 7 p.m., June through early October, in Watkins Park , a spacious, well-parked spot that makes it easy to linger. Now managed by the Town of Mount Airy, the market brings together vendors selling local produce, honey, handmade jewelry, and crafts, alongside weekly live entertainment and a rotating presence of local nonprofits. It's a reliable mid-week reason to get outside in Carroll County.
Running Saturdays from early May through mid-November (9am–1pm) at 12240 Clarksville Pike, Clarksville Commons Farmers Market brings together vendors committed to environmental sustainability in Howard County. Shoppers using SNAP benefits can take advantage of the Maryland Market Money program, which matches up to $10 per household per market day. Vendors like Hensing's Hilltop Acres offer pasture-raised meats and eggs from animals raised without GMOs, the kind of sourcing transparency that makes this market worth the weekly trip.
Lancaster Farm Fresh Co-op brings together more than 120 certified organic member farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, pooling their harvests to offer CSA shares that include organic produce, pastured meats, eggs, and dairy. Baltimore pickup locations make it a practical option for Maryland households wanting to source from small Amish and Plain community farms without the long drive. The co-op model means your membership supports an entire network of family farms working to build healthy soils and keep farmland in production.
Visit website →Maple Lawn Farms in Fulton has been a Howard County anchor for a while, offering CSA memberships alongside a working farm brewery, a petting farm, and educational tours that make it a draw for families as well as committed local food shoppers. The farm raises heritage-style turkeys , toms running 30 to 50 pounds and hens in the 12 to 30 pound range , which gives CSA members and holiday shoppers access to birds well beyond supermarket scale. It sits just off Route 216 in the Scaggsville corridor, convenient to much of the Baltimore-Washington suburban stretch.
Beiler's Meats in Laurel runs a tight operation out of Prince George's County, offering hand-cut black Angus beef that is grass-fed and grain-finished to USDA high choice grade. They're open just three days a week, Thursday through Saturday, and demand runs high enough that online ordering is off the table , call ahead before making the trip to Fort Meade Road. The focused selection and personal service make this one worth a phone call.
Needwood Farms, operating out of Knoxville at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, raises all-natural beef on family-owned land near the Appalachian Trail in Frederick County. Their freezer beef program offers whole, half, and quarter shares, each custom cut to your specifications , a practical way to stock a chest freezer with quality beef while supporting a farm rooted in low-impact agriculture.
Caprikorn Farms in Rohrersville raises goats on browse rather than confinement feed, and the difference shows up in the milk. That natural diet is the foundation for their raw goat milk cheeses, which carry the kind of clean, grassy flavor that pasteurized grocery-store chèvre rarely delivers. If you're in Washington County and haven't yet tracked them down, their Townsend Road farm is the place to start.
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