Broad Beans

Some thoughts on growing Broad Beans

Broad beans are not my favourite bean - that distinction belongs to the suave and sophisticated French Bean.  But they are always very welcome in late spring, one of the first of the new season's vegetables to arrive.

They follow the late summer tender French or runner beans in my rotation, and precede brassicas.

I always make 2 sowings of broad beans. The first is of a winter-hardy variety between late September and November - the earlier the better, but it depends on when the soil has been vacated by the outgoing crop. The variety Aquadulce Claudia  ticks all the boxes for me - prolific, early and able to withstand the harshest of winters. (Indeed in early December 2011, when we had several days of Arctic conditions going down to -11 degrees, my beans were still under the soil, but my neighbour's beans had already broken through and were an inch or 2 tall. Both crops survived, although his did look a bit yellow and shell-shocked for a while.) Then in mid-March I make a second sowing - this year I used Imperial Green Longpod.

Even though the 2 batches were sown 5 months apart, the spring-sown beans were not that far behind and followed on from the autumn-sown ones, even overlapping by a couple of days.

Even though the books suggest that you can grow broad beans through the summer, I have never had much success with later crops and stick to the early ones nowadays.

I sow the beans 6 inches apart in rows a foot apart, which gives me room to hoe between the rows when the plants are still small. I push them in the soil the length of my thumb, with the black stripe down.

Broad beans are incredibly versatile.  In May, when some of the growing points are first attacked by blackfly, (as they inevitably will be), I pick off all the others and cook them like spinach. in garlic butter. This is always very welcome at a time when greens are scarce and we are still in the throes of the hunger-gap. Then a week or so later, the smallest pods can be picked, cooked and served whole, like a kind of coarse mangetout.  After this I pick and pod as many as possible of the tender beans when they are young, We can never eat them quickly enough - they don't stay tender for long - so I like to freeze the surplus at this stage. Then a bit later still, when the pods are fuller, the beans develop a skin and need to be squeezed out before eating. (This is how you get them in the shops and the only experience most people have of broad beans!) Then finally we are left with the few survivors on the blackening stalks. Some of these I keep for next year's seed, and the rest can be dried - I am working on some recipes for dried broad beans (fuls mesdames) such as ful, felafels, refried beans and beanburgers which seem promising. Versatile indeed.

When the stalks have finally been stripped, I cut them off close to ground level, so the root nodules remain in the soil to yield their nitrogen to the brassicas which follow.

Apart from blackfly there are no problems to speak of - yes the leaves always go brown and blotchy, which must be some disease or other, but as it never seems to affect the harvest I just ignore it. It was pleasing to notice that on each of the shoots attacked by blackfly, there was a ladybird happily munching - a good indication of balance in the garden.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I sowed an extra bed of field beans this year, especially for drying. These were sold as a green manure, rather than food,  crop, but were indistinguishable from broad beans when growing, apart from smaller (though far more numerous) pods. They didn't taste much fresh - maybe I left them too late - but gave me several jars full of dried pulses for the winter. I sowed them in November.

Preserving     Any surplus can be stored by drying or freezing. When I freeze broad beans I blanche them for a minute first, plunge in cold water, then spread out on a tray in the freezer. When I dry them I spread them out on an oven tray and leave them for 12 hours in the oven on the very lowest setting, then store in jars.

Saving Seed    Broad bean seed is easy to save. Traditionally you just leave the beans on the vine until they go black and leathery. However if you are following on quickly with another crop, that is not possible. As I always have brassica seedlings chomping at the bit the occupy the vacated land as soon as possible, I spread the bean pods out on a tray in a sunny windowsill for a couple of weeks, until the pod has dried, then shell them and leave them on the tray for a few weeks more until they are completely dry.

It is worth trying to avoid cross pollination when you are growing more than one variety, otherwise the desired features on one variety might be lost in the next generation.  For me, the most important feature is winter-hardiness in the Aquadulce. Taste, yield  and size of the beans from Aquadulce Claudia and Imperial Green Longpod are not vastly different. The late flowers of Aquadulce were just about showing at the same time as the first  flowers of the Imperial Green Longpod and the field beans, so I decided to take my saved seed from the lowest (i.e. the earliest) pods on the overwintering beans.

 Writing this now I have just realized that the field beans may well have crossed with Imperial Green Longpod. That's annoying!  As I have already gone to the trouble of saving Imperial Green Longpod seed, I will use it next year and keep my eye open for any deterioration in size or taste.