Last Broad Bean Harvest and Early Onward Peas

Broad Bean Harvest Finished

We don’t have climate, we have weather. From a cold 14? wet start to the week to the mid-20s. Being so warm we went down around 5pm when it was cooler and took off the rest of the broad beans.

Cut the stalks leaving the roots in the ground with their nitrogen and pulled most of the weeds that had grown between them. The wind and rain had really battered and broken many of the stalks so  the undeveloped pods will not fill out.

We may well have a second crop from plot 29 where the patch is well in flower. We podded the broad beans when we got home – quite a few pods had spaces, which may be due to poor polination with the grotty weather earlier in the year.

Blanched and frozen them, into the upstairs freezer. We are still eating last years beans from the downstairs freezer so a smaller crop may not be that bad a thing.

Read an interesting article in Kitchen Garden magazine about drying as a storage method. We may try this out. It talks about leaving an oven on really low overnight with the door ajar. Visions of our cats getting in the oven in case there is food there or setting fire to the kitchen – we have a gas oven.

May look at building a solar drying oven.. but will we get any sun in August!

The next thing on plot 5 will be to build a compost heap as there is enough material. I’ll probably incorporate some of the turkey litter that is composting into this patch and sow a green manure – either mustard or field beans. Probably mustard would be best as the field beans are hardy.

Peas

Picked some Early Onwards peas – nearly the last of them – which went down well with dinner. Cannot get much fresher than picked at 6pm and eaten at 9pm!