How To Grow Organic Broad Beans?

The widest broad beans, for spring sowing and a fine flavour, are the `Windsors' Green or White. The shortest is the 'Sutton', which grows foot-high bushes for windy gardens, and the hardiest and narrowest, for October and November sowing and picking before the peas, are the 'Longpod' varieties.

The beans that beanfeasters ate with the bacon and boiled beef of Old England were not the modern butter beans, which came with French and runners from Peru following the conquest of that country, but these 'Longpod' broad beans, which supplied the concentrated vegetable protein that made horses friskily 'full of beans'.

There are about 200 seeds in a pint of broad beans, enough for 150 feet of double row, so a half-pint packet is sufficient for most gardens. The seed keeps for a second season, but there is a risk of gaps in the rows if it is kept longer. Any seed that is over-age can be soaked for twenty-four hours and cooked in winter stews.

The flavor of dry broad beans is different, and once their skins have been removed by putting them in an electric liquidizer or by rubbing them through a sieve, they make excellent brown Windsor soup. The best kind to sow in extra rows for harvesting as a year's supply of Old English butter beans is Fenland Green 'Longpod' or its white-seeded companion, which combines the Windsor taste with hardiness.

Because beans are potash-greedy and the chocolate spot fungus attacks them when they are underfed, dig in a barrow-load of compost and 1 lb. of wood ashes to every four square yards before sowing. Sow in three-inch-deep trowel holes eight inches apart along the garden line. Move the line eight inches down the garden and sow a second row with the beans facing the gaps. These pairs of staggered rows support each other, and should have thirty-inch picking room between them.

When the young shoots are up three inches, heap the soil round the stems in three-inch-high ridges, so that if there is a savage spring the beans can shoot again from the base. Take out the growing points with about eight inches of stem when the plants are three feet tall and remove the side shoots for the earliest cropping. The 'Sutton' needs merely pinching in its single rows of low 'bushes' that bristle with pods.

Clear whole roes for eating in May and June, cutting oil the plants for good compost material. Follow up with Brussels sprouts which appreciate the nitrogen from the bean roots and their un-dug soil. When the pods of the remaining beans turn black and split, they are ready for podding. They will keep up to five years without loss of flavor.

This autumn sowing usually misses the 'blight' or blackfly, the bean's worst enemy; because it is toughened by winter and you have removed the young growth the 'blight' needs to start on; but March sowings for July and August picking usually suffer. In the evening, when the bees are asleep, spray with liquid pyrethrum, which will have killed the blackfly and lost its poison by morning, when the bees will be on the blossom again. Broad beans picked small and eaten pods and all are delicious, and from the November sowing are ready well before the early peas.

Check out More useful tips on how to grow organic vegetables at Organic Vegetable Gardening.

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