A little on broad beans | by Mariella

      

Harvesting food from my own garden is such a rewarding experience. It calls to the hunter gatherer in me. It’s so satisfying to return to the kitchen with enough food to make dinner. It’s like harvesting effort, and it’s so simple, you put the time and work in and you get food out.

Last night’s food started out as little green shoots in a row of 5 litre bottles. Because we have a cutworm problem in our garden, we put bottles over all of our seedlings until they are strong and their stems are thick enough to not be cut down in their infancy by these voracious nocturnal predators!

If left unchecked, cutworm can level all of your seedlings and your hard work in one night. If you run out of 5 litre bottles, cutting any bottles up into rings and using those works just as well for cutworm, but because we have snails as well, we use the bottles. A few still get in but it's controllable 

Yesterday we had our first harvest of broad beans. The plants have come up in what I refer to as our mega area, a space in the garden where everything we put in the ground grows to at least double the size! Our broad bean plants are standing at just over a meter and are heavy with new beans.

We love broad beans best fried lightly in butter with a bit of salt. But yesterday we had them with Swiss Chard out the garden and some roasted sunflower seed and they were yum! My mother-in-law makes a delicious broad bean and pea soup.  

Not everyone is familiar with broad beans, they are easy to grow but not available in most supermarkets. The next time you see them I would strongly recommend trying them out. Because they are still green they take 5 minutes to prepare, they are a good source of fibre, Protein, Phosphorus, Copper and Manganese and are truly delicious!