IN PRAISE OF BROAD BEANS

With the gardening year progressing, I’ve decided to share some of my horticultural ignorance in a few blogposts loosely based around my allotment. This one was supposed to have been posted in early March so it’s probably a bit irrelevant now.   

 It’s been a funny old year on the allotment. January was mostly warm and wet in this part of Sussex but February sent a heatwave that had us all believing we’d time-travelled forward into July. Everyone was out on their plots in tee-shirts and colourful sunhats, digging, hoeing and lovingly raking their tilthings and feeling frustrated that, despite the heat, it was only February, winter could still throw some nasty surprises at us and the orgasm of sowing that the weather seemed to inspire was probably best resisted.

One thing I did take a chance with was broad beans. Love them or hate them, broad beans are tough old buggers and, if you can find  a spell when the ground’s not too sodden to get them in, they don’t mind taking their chances with the vagaries of the English spring. I have to say that broad beans aren’t my favourite vegetable, being one of that generation that was put off them (and most other vegetables, especially cabbage) by our darling mums who, despite their genius with roasties and Yorkshire pud, would boil the veg to within an inch of its life as though afraid it might jump up out of the pot and attack them. Not to mention School Dinners care of the School Meals Service – a kind of Meals on Wheels for Children and a hangover from the war. Their piece de résitance was spam fritters (or spum fluppers as we used to call them) though they did do quite a nice high-density chocolate pudding with pink custard. What has all this to do with broad beans? I hear you ask and the answer is nothing. The purpose of school in the fifties, it seemed to me, was to systematically destroy any budding passion for anything – nature, classical music, Shakespeare – and vegetables. it’s taken me most of my life to discover that cabbage, for instance, doesn’t have to be a slimy green sludge but – lightly cooked with a little butter and a pinch of sugar – a delicious and nutritious vegetable. The same is true, to some extent, of broad beans. The trick is to pick them young before they turn into leathery old pouches and not overcook them. Also, if you lightly boil them then put them through the fart machine (as we’ve affectionately dubbed our ageing blender) you can make them into quite a presentable dip – a bit like guacamole and even less appetising.

First Germination!

 

Another advantage of getting broad beans in early is that you avoid them being decimated (to some extent) by slugs and caterpillars and their flowers being covered in that horrible blackfly shit. Although this doesn’t seem to affect the yield too much, it does looks unsightly when you’re showing people around your patch and trying to impress them – which I do all the time, mostly unsuccessfully. Broad beans are also copious croppers – a couple of rows should be more than enough to get the average family up to that ‘Oh God, not broad beans again’ threshold although any exess can be frozen. Also, since they’re early, you can get them done and dusted by July when there’s still time to use the ground for something else. The variety I’ve sown is “Masterpiece Green Longpod” but, quite frankly, they all taste the same to me. A broad bean is a broad bean is a broad bean, after all – unless it makes a drastic career move and becomes a Mexican Jumping Bean. The geezer writing on the back of the packet – clearly a frustrated poet – says “harvest when pods become swollen with succulent, tasty young beans!” Yeah, okay.

Of course there are all sorts of fun things you can do off the allotment at this time of year, like sowing French beans, leeks, courgettes and all sorts of other things indoors in pots or seed trays then annoying your partner by filling up every available inch of windowsill with them. Alternatively, you can just sit in a rocking chair, drinking a cup of tea and mumbling wise old rustic remarks like ‘Get a root of Glossop-weed in your tilthing and he’ll be there till Wythantide.’

In my next blogpost, I shall describe my sod.

 

My office is doubling as a greenhouse!