Broad beans
It is that time of year again: seed time. This weekend marks the beginning of this years seed sowing. I spent Saturday at Stepping Stones Farm, in Stepney, preparing for a series of workshops that I am going to be delivering with a friend (Robin). I also met the wonderful Alex, who we are going to be working with more and more this summer. We had some volunteers around and a few visitors, so we did a bit of a dry run and taught them seed sowing. It is still quite early on in the season, so we started off with broad beans, Super Aquadulce, to be precise.
You may know already that I am a great lover of broad beans, and was very excited last year to get great big bunches of them in my veg box. This year it is more exciting because I will be growing them myself as well. Broad beans are sown during the cold months: either during the autumn or spring (depending on the variety). They are part of the legume family and so fix nitrogen, which is a super useful compound that plants need to grow. Bees also love the flowers. Are you convinced yet that it’s a winner? Hope so.
I went to Seedy Sunday (more on that later) yesterday and picked up some biodynamic Witkiem broad beans. These are renown as being tasty, productive and hardy. So I am going to experiment, sowing the beans at three different times of the month and see which ones do better. I will update you on the progress.