We have been eying off the broad beans for a few weeks and Lee Ann decided that today would be when we harvested out first lot of beans. We picked beans the that were approx 15cm long. I have 8 plants in this lot and another 5 on another vege patch (but they are a bit younger). We picked what seemed like a lot.

Fresh Broad Beans

2 kgs in fact. I have never had broad beans before and the ones when freshly picked seemed a little bitter. We had two recipes picked out, a dip and a pasta dish.

Well after removing them from the pod, boiling them and removing the outer skin of the beans we had only 400 grams, while that was enough for dinner, it was not enough for the dip. So 200g have been frozen and we should get approx 2-3 more pickings of the same size from the plants. We will try the dip next week.

Shelling the Broad Beans

Dinner was great, just a simple pasta dish with bacon, onion, garlic, thyme, parsley and broad beans. We will be making it again.

Now I know how much to plant, I would probably double the quantity grown for next year and go for approx 16-20 plants.

Also today I removed the last of the broccoli (which we blanched and froze), planted some celery, fennel and water melons. And put a tray of seedlings down

• Capsicum
  • California Wonder
  • Corno Di Toro
  • Alma Paprika
  • Long Red Cayenne
• Chilli
  • Tobasco

A last comment while talking about the garden some of the Queensland Blue pumkins have sprouted.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 11:21 am and is filed under Food, Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.