Broad Beans

My first (properly) edible items to come from the allotment (we won't mention the peculiar frankenradishes from last year).

These broad beans were the first second plant I planted. (The first batch were lost to slugs whilst I was feeling all merry about being organic, so the second round were given a liberal dose of slug pellets and fared much better).

The plants themselves looked super puny especially when I glance over at my neighbour's plot whose broad bean plants seemed about ten times the size, but puny or not, they were soon covered in loads of black and white flowers which developed into lots of beans.

Broad beans are like catnip to black fly. The stems of the plants get sooooo infested with the little blighters that the whole plant seems to turn black. We tried squirting with soapy water, applying organic blackfly sprays, but the most affective method is to just plain scrape them off with your thumb and fingers. Ewwwwwwwwwwww.

Anyway, onto the beans. I love em.

I usually put them in a cold rice salad with lemon juice, olive oil and mint but was sent this fantastic recipe from the Able & Cole magazine which turns them into something truly outstanding:

Broad bean pod fritters with Broad bean and feta dip.

 

For the dip: Blanch the shelled beans in boiling water for one minute, then pop the green beans from their little white cases., blend them with crumbled feta, fresh mint and a glug of olive oil.

Voila.

Why I love it - It reminds me of those little green peppers you can have as tapas, liberally sprinkled with salt. Yum. I also love that you are eating the bean and the pod - which I usually have just discarded in the compost.

Weeds. A beginning.

Let me start by explaining;  I can just about get mustard and cress seeds to sprout on a bit of wet cotton wool- and that is the total of my prior gardening knowledge to taking on an allotment.

I say allotment - it was, as you can see, a tiny meadow of grass, bindweed and (after some googling) curly dock.  It is also only 60 metres square - which according to all the old school allotment books Ive been devouring, isn't even half of a proper allotment. Its about a quarter.  This makes me feel queasy as as far as I'm concerned it already seems a daunting size to tackle.

These pictures were taken last summer when we were allocated a plot.  It is at the bottom of the allotments and is bordered by a tree line that means it spends until 11am in gradually retreating shade.  I hear this isn't ideal, but as the Mum of a ginger toddler, shade is by no means my enemy.

We set about by reading up on allotment books from the library, allotment forums on t'internet and came away even more clueless and baffled than we began. There is sooooo much conflicting advice out there and also different advice seems to apply to different times of year.

Him Indoors decided to get all hung ho, hired a strimmer and took it down to ankle height. (Sorry homeless frogs). He then used a frowned-upon rotator and turned the whole surface over.

You've probably seen the scene in the sorcerers apprentice where Mickey chops up the broom into a thousand tiny brooms and just creates a bigger pain in the arse? Yeah…that.

So then we decided to cover it in a load of black plastic and leave it until the following spring. I left one corner uncovered where I dug a single bed and then unsuccessfully tried to plant some autumn things that were either washed away by awful weather or didn't appear to grow properly.  Wet weather soon turned the bed into a bog and as Christmas appeared I pretty much gave up - planning to start again in the spring.

So thats where we are today. We now have a bog partially covered in black plastic. Far from the idyll I picture in my mind.