Find our recipes for seasonal fruit and vegetables all in one place
This Floating Island dessert is among several strawberry recipes featured in our Taste Spring! e-cookbook. Kathy Morrison
Every Sunday, Sacramento Digs Gardening publishes a seasonal recipe featuring fresh fruit or vegetables. Almost always, these recipes are inspired by what we’ve harvested from our own gardens or found at farmers markets and farm stands. We alternate weeks -- Debbie one Sunday, Kathy the next -- but the recipes always have a taste of Sacramento in every bite.
As SDG approaches its fifth anniversary, we realized: We have enough recipes for a cookbook!
Make that four cookbooks, one planned for each season.
Debuting now online is “Taste Spring!” – our first Sacramento Digs Gardening e-cookbook. It contains more than 60 recipes, each featuring our wonderful Spring bounty.
In the Sacramento region and all of California, Spring offers an amazing assortment of fresh fruit and vegetables – the first taste of a new harvest or the farewell to cool-season favorites. There’s so much inspiration for us gardening cooks!
We admit: We’re partial to strawberries – there are a dozen strawberry-centric recipes in this assortment. But we go way beyond your basic shortcake. Instead, we feature strawberry salad with edible violets, and strawberry slaw with fig balsamic vinaigrette. Strawberries stud a quick bread, flavor a no-bake cheesecake and top French toast (with cream). They also star in desserts with evocative names such as Angel’s Mess and Floating Island. (And in a strawberry shortcake with a twist: Hard-boiled eggs.)
Why stop there? Besides berry-good delights, this collection features nine more Spring fruits: Apricot, blueberry, cherry, orange, lemon, loquat, nectarine, peach and rhubarb. (Yes, rhubarb is technically a veggie, but we’re counting it as a fruit for recipe purposes.)
And we love Spring vegetables! In this cookbook, we feature 18: Artichoke, asparagus, beet, carrot, chard, corn, fava bean, fava greens, fennel, green bean, green garlic, green onion, kale, lettuce, pea, potato, spinach and zucchini.
We hope you enjoy these recipes as much as we did creating and testing them. Now, you can find our best Spring recipes, all with one click.
Check it out at Taste Spring!
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Garden Checklist for week of Nov. 3
November still offers good weather for fall planting:
* If you haven't already, it's time to clean up the remains of summer. Pull faded annuals and vegetables. Prune dead or broken branches from trees.
* Now is the best time to plant most trees and shrubs. This gives them plenty of time for root development before spring growth. They also benefit from fall and winter rains.
* Set out cool-weather annuals such as pansies and snapdragons.
* Lettuce, cabbage and broccoli also can be planted now.
* Plant garlic and onions.
* Keep planting bulbs to spread out your spring bloom. Some possible suggestions: daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths, tulips, anemones and scillas.
* This is also a good time to seed wildflowers and plant such spring bloomers as sweet pea, sweet alyssum and bachelor buttons.
* Rake and compost leaves, but dispose of any diseased plant material. For example, if peach and nectarine trees showed signs of leaf curl this year, clean up under trees and dispose of those leaves instead of composting.
* Save dry stalks and seedpods from poppies and coneflowers for fall bouquets and holiday decorating.
* For holiday blooms indoors, plant paperwhite narcissus bulbs now. Fill a shallow bowl or dish with 2 inches of rocks or pebbles. Place bulbs in the dish with the root end nestled in the rocks. Add water until it just touches the bottom of the bulbs. Place the dish in a sunny window. Add water as needed.
* Give your azaleas, gardenias and camellias a boost with chelated iron.
* For larger blooms, pinch off some camellia buds.
* Prune non-flowering trees and shrubs while dormant.
* To help prevent leaf curl, apply a copper fungicide spray to peach and nectarine trees after they lose their leaves this month. Leaf curl, which shows up in the spring, is caused by a fungus that winters as spores on the limbs and around the tree in fallen leaves. Sprays are most effective now.
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