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 May 5
Survey your garden after the May 4 rainstorm. Heavy rain and gusty winds can break the neck of large flowers such as roses. Also:
* Keep an eye on new transplants or seedlings; they could take a pounding from the rain.
* Watch out for powdery mildew. Warmth following moist conditions can cause this fungal disease to “bloom,” too. If you see a leaf that looks like it’s dusted with powdered sugar, snip it off.
* After the storm, start setting out tomato transplants, but wait on the peppers and eggplants (they want warmer nights). Pinch off any flowers on new transplants to make them concentrate on establishing roots instead of setting premature fruit.
* Trim dead flowers but not leaves from spring-flowering bulbs such as daffodils and tulips. Those leaves gather energy to create next year's flowers. Also, give the bulbs a fertilizer boost after bloom.
* Pinch chrysanthemums back to 12 inches for fall flowers. Cut old stems to the ground.
* Mulch around plants to conserve moisture and control weeds.
* From seed, plant beans, beets, cantaloupes, carrots, corn, cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, radishes and squash.
* Plant onion sets.
* In the flower garden, plant seeds for asters, cosmos, celosia, marigolds, salvia, sunflowers and zinnias. Transplant petunias, zinnias, geraniums and other summer bloomers.
* Plant perennials and dahlia tubers for summer bloom.
* Don’t wait; plant summer bulbs, such as gladiolus and tuberous begonias.
* Harvest cabbage, lettuce, peas and green onions.
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