Homeschool Garden Club – Broad Beans

We are lucky, here down, in the south of the country because we can sow the last crop of the year to go in to the grown - board beans. This will be out last job of the Orchard Training Garden Club of the year, before we start looking at putting the tools way for the Christmas holidays.

We will plant directly in to cleared soil, that has been well manured. They will germinate with two to four weeks and then the young plants will sit there happily over the cold months and once the spring starts to warm up they will be off.

There are two main types of broad beans – long pods and short pod (also known as Windsors).

We grow the long pods which are hardier and well suited for our homeschool gardening needs. we also like them beans at the other end of the season when we eat them.

We will be sowing hem 8cm apart as we have found that this works best for us. we will take it in turns to hoe regularly to remove weeds as soon as they appear. We have a stock of bamboo cans for staking when the time comes. Our weather watches will let us know if we need to water and we will harvest in stages picking from the bottom upwards.

We have learnt from the last three years that mice can steel the seeds before they germinate so we put gooseberry clipping over the top of the line of seeds and this seems to help.