Warwick columnist shares favourite new-season recipes

With spring in the air, Daily News contributor Krista Bjorn shares her tips, tricks, and favourite produce.

FRESH IS BEST: Scrambled eggs with fresh spring veggies and homemade cheese. Picture: Krista Bjorn

IT'S been a busy weekend on our farm as we make the most of these gorgeously sunny but cool days before spring arrives.

While visiting a friend in the city, we stopped at her local fruit and veg shop and discovered a whole trolley full of big boxes of not-quite-perfect fresh vegetables and fruits for only $3 each! I bought all 12 and somehow fit them into my little car along with two mock orange trees, two bougainvillea, and two boxes of seedlings from a local nursery. It made me smile as I drove home with my car full of the scent of sun-warmed strawberries, apples, pears, and all manner of goodness.

Since then I've been hard at work in our kitchen washing, hulling, and freezing berries, peeling, slicing, and freezing bananas, and roasting tray after tray of tomatoes with big heads of garlic to turn into sauce for pasta, casseroles, and stews.

This week I'll be tackling the boxes of pears and apples, drying some, freezing others, and juicing some to make pear and apple cider.

Power cuts homes, but no rain damage

Just some of Krista Bjorn’s spring harvest.

I've also been hard at work in the gardens. I got so many seeds planted last week and many of them are already coming up! Five types of radishes, three kinds of onions, and innumerable greens, brassicas, and flowers.

This morning, while Bear collected eggs, I thinned out the carrot patches and harvested purple, red, orange, and yellow baby carrots, a few purple-topped turnips, big handful of asparagus, a few spears of spring onion, and a bowlful of sugar snap peas. I chopped them up then fried them gently in ghee until the baby carrots were soft and the peas were glossy but still had a lovely crunch. I piled the veggies on top of scrambled eggs spiced with just a hint of curry and added a few crumbles of homemade farm cheese and it was a luscious breakfast, perfect to welcome spring and celebrate its bounty.

Now it's time for a cuppa before headings outside to transplant celery and Italian parsley, find a good spot for the new elderberry seedlings, and plant sweet pea seeds to replace the seedlings eaten by the resident mouse population.

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