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Grow, Cook, Eat by Willi Galloway is a handy little book, despite the entertainingly transparent subtitle: A Food Lover's Guide to Vegetable Gardening Including 50 Recipes, Plus Harvesting and Storage Tips. If you're spending your Saturday tending to your vegetable garden rather than pruning roses, we're pretty sure you're more likely an avid "food lover" than a weekend scented-candlemaker sort.

Semantics aside, it's simply a long-winded reminder that agents or publishers often come up with titles and book jacket cover blurbs, not authors, as the book itself is a fun little reference guide. Expect an encyclopedic layout, only here in a large-format, photo-driven style that makes those monologues on growing onions more engaging. In each vegetable category you'll find basics on growing, say, spinach and mustard greens followed by several recipes (spinach risotto, mustard green turnovers).

A side note: Check out Galloway's blog for community garden-friendly vegetable trellis and other handy summer "How not to grow a tomato" ideas. But first, get the rest of our review, and Galloway's citrusy roasted beet recipe, after the jump.

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GuzzleandNosh

Chef Govind Armstrong in the Post & Beam garden

Looking to get dirty this weekend? Baldwin Hill's Post & Beam is launching the first of its summer series of Gardening Club workshops this weekend with help from horticulturalist Geri Miller and head chef Govind Armstrong. The arrival of spring means that vegetables like basil, peppers, squash, eggplant and heirloom tomatoes are being planted in the restaurant's sprawling patio garden, which will serve as the classroom for those interested in honing their green thumb.

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jgarbee

Salsa rose at the Huntington Rose Garden

Wander around any formal rose garden with name plaques this time of year (the Huntington, Palisades Park in Santa Monica), and you'll likely bump into several Hollywood celebrity stunners like Marilyn Monroe (a tall apricot flower with "large bloom size," per the official description). In the rose-naming game, food- and drink-related names are a close second to celebrities, for the same anthropomorphic reasons.

"Berries and Cream" is a striped rose, "Hot Chocolate" is a brown rose and the Glenfiddich whiskey rose is amber-colored (our favorite new gift for dry friends with a sense of humor). There's even an entire Hybrid Tea classification, the most common modern rose varietal. Why all the food and drink fuss?

Turn the page for more from Marcia Sanchez-Walsh of the Los Angeles Rose Society on naming roses, how to get your food favorites officially registered as a rose varietal (the Dodger Dog, the Ludo), and the best local nursery for sourcing those floral whiskey and chocolate varietals.

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A. Scattergood

artichokes at the Santa Monica farmers market

Saturday is Good Food Day L.A.. We eat, therefore we travel. That's a given to Angelenos. We're always on the move, our senses honed to check out a taste we've never experienced before in a neighborhood unfamiliar to us. So in a sense we're always learning: about the city, about the people who make our food, and about what's out there and how we can enjoy it. So take the leap and use Good Food Day L.A. as a way to enlarge your sphere of local tastes/local issues. There's so much happening on March 31 that I have a whole separate document for you.

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Tomatomania

Tomatomania is to tomato lovers what Louboutins are to the shoe-crazed. There is every style, every shape, every color. Lovely mentors are there to coach you. Their goal is to help you succeed. It's more than a plant sale, it's a springtime cultural event.

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Lauren Noble

Chef Esnault in the garden

Restaurant chefs' gardens are popping up in unusual places, but nowhere more unlikely than in the midst of downtown L.A.'s skyscrapers. Flourishing on an upper level of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall is an outdoor rooftop garden -- public at that -- that lets visitors take in the now iconic, curved, stainless steel exterior close-up and provides space for urban acreage tended by Patina's chefs.

Within the Blue Ribbon Garden (named for the Music Center's volunteer support group) is a feast of unusual herbs and edible flowers: These plants are the project of Patina executive chef Tony Esnault. Look closely among the geraniums and ornamental grasses to find just-planted nasturtiums, cowslip primrose, rosemary and fennel. The year-old garden is not in dedicated raised beds -- nor is it easily apparent. And that's how Chef Esnault and landscape designer Melinda Taylor conceived it: The edible plants, which change seasonally, are hidden in plain sight.

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Jewish Federation

the 2011 Community Service Day

If arts and crafts with Bubbe isn't your thing, maybe you'd like to help plant a Food Forest in Studio City. Or you can dig in the dirt with the Florence Firestone Community Gardeners. Or if you want to get in on some kitchen action while making new friends, then go to Ronald McDonald House and help cook a truly happy meal. The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles has a menu of volunteer opportunities this Sunday, March 25, for its Community Service Day.

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Follow Evan on Twitter @evankleiman and read her KCRW blog Good Food.

Emily Green

Blackberries pinned to trellising

If you're the sort of person who visits farmers markets looking for exotic citrus or perfect stone fruit or native berries -- or if you just like to watch footage of bears in bushes on YouTube -- then you have something to read this morning. Emily Green (dry gardener, water expert, former London restaurant critic) has written today's feature food story about Rubus ursinus, which is not a misplaced Harry Potter character but a native blackberry.

Then there are pies, which during marionberry season in Oregon are served with a white line of powdered sugar on top, says Pitelka, a joke about the former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry, who was caught with cocaine.

Read the full story here.

Jeanne Kelley

foraged salad with goat cheese

You don't have to be a Nordic, Michelin starred-chef like Rene Redzepi to work wild-grown foods into your cooking. We can forage right here in Los Angeles County. Because of our summery winter, edible plants such as lamb's quarters, miner's lettuce, nettles and wood sorrel are flourishing now in our local canyons and mountains and maybe even in your own backyard.

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Tomatomania

Tomatoes

Even during a warm winter, most of us spend part of the season dreaming of luscious summer fruits and vegetables, especially tomatoes. Yes, the vine-ripe variety are still a way off, but it is finally time to start planting and Tomatomania, the spectacular annual touring tomato seedling plant sale, is here to help.

The 2012 season begins with a free lecture on tomato varieties by Tomatomaniafounder Scott Daigrea and then a plant sale at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens -- today, March 8, at 2:30 p.m.

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