My Broad Bean crop

I have spoken on here before of my overwhelming love for broad beans.  They are definitely vying for top place on my all time favourite vegetable list.  I would have been quite happy if broad beans had been coming out of my ears, sadly though my ears have remained resolutely broad bean free.  I had a crop, but it was disappointingly small after the success of my seedlings.

You get in there my dear and fertilise!  Surprisingly pretty I think you will agree.

My plants flowered nicely, I was never aware before of actually how attractive broad bean flowers are.  Again like the cucumber nobody be growing them for flowers but they did pep up my patch.  They have a delightful way of corkscrewing their way up the stem and the combination of black, fine lines and hint of pink combine to produce something rather delicate and feminine for what I would consider a fairly robust bean.  The bees loved them so we were fully fertilised.

Lots of baby beans

But less big beans..

This is where it all seemed to fall apart though.  Lots of mini pods formed and yet I did not seem to end up picking many mature ones.  I think the answer to this may lie in water.  I was unaware that broad beans like a lot of water while in flower to ensure a good crop.  My aunt did, as she like I is a keen broad bean-er but she did not disclose this valuable tit-bit of information until it was too late.  Thanks aunty.  So I have a feeling the majority of my beans shrivelled off.  That’s not to say I didn’t get any, I did and they were superb, but nobody was getting fat on that crop and considering the number of plants I would have expected a higher yield. 

I did pick more than 6 beans, these were just the first ones.  Six beans would officially count as a disaster I feel

Well known TV gardener in the UK Christine Walkden said on a radio programme earlier in the year that lots of people make the mistake of only doing one sowing of vegetables and that if you kept sowing you would get successive crops of the same vegetable.  Im pretty sure Christine knows her stuff so I followed her advice, and made a complete balls-up of it.  I sowed another batch of broad beans about a month after the first thinking they would take a while to get going and once the first peas were finished there would be space to plant them out.  The beans did not get this schedule of events, shot up in double quick time and started flowering in their cells and growing through the bottoms into the soil beneath when the mother randomly put them in the border for reasons unknown.  By the time I managed to get them in, they were basically a write off.

There is no need to beat about the bush: that is a cracking case of rust

A few weeks after planting this second batch I wandered down to check on progress to find a cracking case of broad bean rust spread through the whole lot.  Its funny because one minute there was nothing and the next it was a sea of orange.  While this doesn’t really affect the beans themselves I decided to cut my losses, pick what I could and yank the whole lot out.  It wasn’t pretty and my next batch of plants needed the space, luckily these have been far more successful!

So overall not a complete waste of time but plenty to improve upon for next year for higher returns.