Herbs, fruits and vegetables grown in the garden include purple basil, Russian tarragon, French tarragon, watermelon, cantaloupe, yellow squash, cucumber, rainbow tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, purple red beans, yellow onions, chives, sweet red onions, black beauty eggplant, purple eggplant, baby carrots, rainbow carrots, beets, curly parsley, nasturtium petals, culinary lavender, ghost white pumpkin, summer squash and sweet corn.

For gardeners with an abundance of tomatoes, zucchini, hearts of palm and basil (or cooks with the opportunity to gather these items), Chef Fiorelli offers us the following recipe:

A cool drink for these hot summer days, courtesy of the CuisinArt Resort & Spa in Anguilla. The resort gets the cucumbers and sage for this cocktail from its comprehensive hydroponic farm and organic gardens. For more information on the resort and the hydroponic farm (which can be toured), visit http://cuisinartresort.com

CuisinArt's Signature Hydroponic Cucumber and Sage Martini

Ingredients:
4 pistachios
1 packet of sugar
1-inch hydroponic cucumber (unpeeled)
6 sage leaves
1 oz. Grey Goose® Poire
½ oz. Cointreau®
½ oz. freshly squeezed lime juice
½ oz. cane syrup

Preparation:

Grind pistachios to a dust in a coffee grinder and mix with sugar on a plate. Wet martini glass edge with water and rim the glass with the pistachio/sugar dust.

In a cocktail shaker, muddle cucumber and sage leaves to a paste. Add ice and all other ingredients and shake vigorously.

Strain liquid into a martini glass. Garnish with a thinly sliced cucumber round and a sage leaf.

It’s pretty much a given today that the top chefs are looking to use the freshest produce in their cooking. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to follow chefs as they traveled to local farms or scoured farmers markets and talked to the gardeners to find just the right ingredients for that night’s meal.

Brix, the well-regarded restaurant in the Napa Valley town of Yountville, has taken that symbiotic relationship of gardener and chef a step further by having its own two (actually 16, if you include the vineyard and orchard) acres on the property set aside for produce to be used in the restaurant.

I recently talked to Guillermo “Memo” Rodriguez, the master gardener at Brix and started by asking what the chefs had come to pick from his garden that day. The answer was English peas, plus some tarragon and parsley and thyme for an English-pea risotto that Executive Chef Anne Gingrass-Paik was looking to put back on the menu. The peas were also being used in a chicken pasta that was already on the menu. (If anyone was lucky enough to eat that dish at Brix on May 29, please let me know how it was …)