In April of this year we cleared a stretch of five beds of their spent tomato, eggplant and pepper plants. We dibbed holes and sowed the whole area to broad beans. The timing was great, we watered the seeds in and went away on holiday for the whole of May and luckily it rained just enough while we were gone so that we came home to a sea of young broad bean seedlings.
By the end of July these plants were big enough for us to harvest broad bean tips for our winter veggie boxes and restaurant customers and we only stopped harvesting off them in about mid October.
At the start of September we slashed three of the five rows of plants (leaving the two rows on the left in this picture). We covered the area with a tarp leaving all of the plant residue on the surface.
Jump forward to mid November and we peeled back the tarp, ran over the dried residue with the push mower and catcher and used it around our juvenile tomatillo plants as mulch. Then we planted new crops; a bed of English spinach, a bed of bok choy and a bed of borlotti beans.
We are still harvesting broad beans from the remaining two rows. They started in mid October and we’ll probably make next week their last.
It’s such a useful crop to us, helping to keep the soil active through winter while providing a bounty of produce. The beans are kind of the end goal and coming on in November while we are still waiting for everything else to get going is the best. But everything about growing broad beans is a win for us (tips and beans) and a win for the soil (green manure, nitrogen fixing and source of mulch).
BP
