The Gardening Chef Field Guide Library
The Gardening Chef Field Guide Library is a growing collection of practical garden-to-kitchen guides for cooks, gardeners, preservers, and anyone who wants to grow with purpose.
Each guide helps you understand one crop, ingredient family, or preservation system more deeply: how to grow it, cook it, store it, preserve it, and use it well.
These are not just gardening articles. They are field guides for turning everyday harvests into better meals, pantry value, kitchen confidence, and seasonal wisdom.
Start with a guide below, then follow the connections between ingredients, preservation methods, and garden-to-table uses.
Start Here
Types of Onions and Alliums
A kitchen garden field guide to onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, scallions, chives, and storage alliums. Learn which alliums are best raw, cooked, stored, grown first, and used for flavor foundations.
Read the Onion Family Field Guide
Types of Peppers
A fresh-to-dried field guide to sweet peppers, hot peppers, dried chiles, roasted peppers, fermented peppers, sauces, powders, and pantry flavor.
Read the Pepper Library Field Guide
Types of Tomatoes
A garden-to-kitchen tomato guide covering cherry, grape, slicer, beefsteak, paste, sauce, and heirloom tomatoes, plus harvest timing and preservation.
Garden-to-Kitchen Guides
Herb Flavor Guide
A guide to using herbs as flavor multipliers in the kitchen, from fresh garnishes to preserved blends, sauces, oils, and garden pairings.
Read the Herb Flavor Guide
Beans and Peas Field Guide
A garden-to-kitchen guide to beans, peas, fresh pods, shelling crops, dried beans, pantry meals, soil building, and seasonal abundance.
Read the Beans and Peas Field Guide
Squash and Cucumber Abundance Guide
A field guide for summer squash, winter squash, cucumbers, pickles, storage crops, garden abundance, and smart kitchen use.
Read the Squash and Cucumber Guide
Preservation and Pantry Guides
Root Cellar Guide
A practical field guide for storing crops, reducing waste, and turning seasonal abundance into pantry value.
Read the Root Cellar Guide
Preservation Pantry Guide
A guide to freezing, drying, canning, fermenting, storing, and preserving the harvest with purpose.
Read the Preservation Pantry Guide
Oils, Fats, Lard, and Cooking Grease Guide
A kitchen field guide to cooking fats, flavor, storage, reuse, safety, and how fat carries flavor through real meals.
Read the Cooking Fats Field Guide
Why These Field Guides Matter
Most gardening advice tells you how to grow something.
Most cooking advice tells you how to use something.
The Gardening Chef Field Guides connect both sides.
They help you ask better questions:
What should I grow?
How will I actually use it?
How should I harvest it?
Can I preserve it?
Does it store well?
What meals does it improve?
How does it fit into the bigger garden-to-kitchen system?
That is the purpose of this library.
Grow with purpose.
Cook with confidence.
Preserve the harvest.
Use what you grow.
Honor the Harvest.