You grew it; now eat it. Listen here for recipe ideas

When I joined Kevin Jordan and Austin Blank for the Green Acres Garden Podcast, we talked at length about a common topic for food gardeners: Making use of your harvest. In other words, you grew it; now eat it.

Every backyard farmer knows that lament, heard most often during zucchini season or weeks after an enthusiastic planting spree. To me, it also echoes in my head when it’s time to harvest something I tried growing for the first time, such as some very pretty melons or unusual Asian greens.

What we grow very directly inspires what we cook. Our readers see that every Sunday in the selection of recipes that Kathy Morrison and I create for Sacramento Digs Gardening. Our three seasonal e-cookbooks are packed with dozens of examples of cooking what’s in season – and in abundance.

Before you plant, it helps to have some suggestions of what to do with the product of your gardening efforts. Our most recent e-cookbook, Taste Fall!, has more than 60 seasonal recipes using what we’re harvesting now – more than 30 different fruits and vegetables.

But our Taste Spring! e-cookbook has just as many ideas for how to use the vegetables you’re likely growing or planting right now.

What to do with your harvest – now and for harvests to come – is the basis of a project Sacramento Digs Gardening is now working on with our friends at Green Acres Nursery & Supply. We plan to provide easy links to our recipes at point of plant or seed purchase. (More on that to come.)

Episode No. 99 in the Green Acres podcast series, “Fall Recipes from the Garden,” focuses on using our bountiful fall harvest. For me, that’s a bumper crop of Fuyu persimmons and apples.

Also an avid food gardener, Kevin teaches gardening and a lot more at Leo A. Palmiter Jr./Sr. High School; he’s nursery and landscape instructor for the school’s Sustainable Environments Learning Academy. He was honored by the Sacramento Office of Education as the 2023 Teacher of the Year.

For this podcast, we had a great (and much longer) conversation about gardening and recipe ideas. Austin worked his editing magic to get it to fit into 28 minutes.