Photo: Sarah Kobos

The trek to the farmers’ market, especially this time of year, can transform the tedious chore of grocery shopping into an idyllic summer treat. Soaking in the sun, snagging a little pastry, and filling your bags to the brim with stone fruits, melons, and bouquets of kale can feel like a scene straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie.

When you get home, though, that high can be met with a real reality check: a fridge stuffed to the gills with more in-season delicacies than anyone can go through in a week.

Read the guide

How to keep your produce fresh for weeks→

But when faced with the potential of wilted leaves and moldy berries, we think this season poses an opportunity to get creative. Here are a few of our experts’ go-to tricks for getting as much mileage out of your summer produce as possible:

Save it for a rainy day: Kitchen editor Gabriella Gershenson uses our top-pick vacuum sealer to seal freshly picked blueberries and store them in the freezer.

Make some orbs: Supervising editor Marilyn Ong likes to bust out her melon baller and enlist her children to prepare glorious orbs for melon and cucumber salad.

Try a new cooking project: Last year, deputy editor Annemarie Conte embarked on “the Sisyphean task” of making maraschino cherries from scratch—an endeavor made so much simpler with a cherry pitter that she just might dare to try again this year.

Below, we’ll walk you through some more of our experts’ best advice and gear for getting the most out of your fruits and veggies, ahead of what we hope will be many more bountiful farmers’ market treks to come. Enjoy it out there.

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A great tote bag It packs down to easily fit in your pocket and comes in fun prints→

How to clean your produce Get rid of grit and dirt with this simple advice→

The best serrated knife Great for slicing juicy summer tomatoes→

Transform any vegetable into noodles A good spiralizer can help you effortlessly create spiralized or ribboned vegetables with ease→

Photo: Michael Murtaugh

The manual vegetable choppers you may have seen on your feeds claim to solve an age-old cooking chore by cutting ingredients in seconds. We get it—watching a whole bell pepper get slammed through a grate and diced in seconds is enticing.

But after testing 16 of these gadgets to see how they really fared in the kitchen, there’s not one model we’d wholeheartedly recommend. Sad. But we do have some alternatives that actually make preparing meals easier.

Not all they’re chopped up to be→

As for next week’s cookouts? We’ll leave you with NYT Cooking’s collection of the best Fourth of July recipes.

You can reach the Wirecutter Newsletters team at newsletters@wirecutter.com. We can’t always respond, but we do love to hear from you.

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