Home Delivery: Another Way to Avoid Summer Heat

Three Sisters Garden is an Excellent Farm-to-Home Option for Chicago Local Foodies

Photo by Bob Benenson

I published an article on Saturday (June 22) with tips to keep your farmers market food fresh all the way home during hot spells. Today, I share another idea that doesn't even require you to go outside: home delivery direct from a farm.

To that I have to add the disclaimer that only a handful of farms — most of them with Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription plans — do home delivery.

But I am fortunate that Three Sisters Garden, which grows beautiful produce in many varieties in Kankakee, Illinois, does home delivery in many parts of Chicago, including the one in which I live. My latest delivery (in the above photo), which came on Saturday, included an arrowhead cabbage, broccoli, lemon verbena, dill and bulb onions.

Owner Tracey Vowell — who became a friend during her long tenure as a vendor at Chicago's Green City Market — took an unconventional path to farming. She spent many years as executive chef at Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, the flagships of Chef Rick Bayless' regional Mexican restaurants. During that time, Tracey helped build the relationships with local farmers that helped Rick stand out as a leading farm-to-table chef.

She decided to try her hand at farming, buying the Kankakee property in 2000, and a few short years later left her culinary career behind to go all in at Three Sisters Garden. The name is a reference to corn, beans and squash, the three crops that form the core of Indigenous Americans' sustainable agricultural practices.

Photo by Bob Benenson

Tracey's sweet corn, seen in the 2023 photo above, is her signature crop. She also grows ginormous and delicious watermelons. Those will come along a little later this summer. To see what see has available now, and to see if your zip code is in Three Sisters Garden's delivery zone, click the button below to go to their website.

Deliveries are made on Saturday, with an order deadline of end-of-day Thursday, and Wednesday, with an end-of-day Monday deadline to submit.

VISIT THREE SISTERS GARDEN'S WEBSITE