Broadly speaking...

A patch of broad beans in the winter garden is a fine thing. We have 'unpodding' sessions at the kitchen bench. Removing the beans from their pods is a little like taking babies out of sleeping bags. What is in those skins because my fingers are stained nearly black afterwards.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of people tell me they absolutely cannot stand them as a vegetable. For some it's the texture, for others it's flavour, and I suspect a fair few simply find them unappealing to look at when they've been boiled in their flubby grey skins. Cooked like this, they remind me of 'timptees' , a term my father coined to describe wrinkly fingers and toes which have been soaking in the bath too long. It's a bit fiddly to remove the grey skins, but the green bean inside is such a tempting, lush colour I think it's definitely worth the bother. The Italians have crafted a few different recipes using peeled beans - including puree's. Broad bean purée with wild chicory is a typical Puglian dish in Italy. including a 'broad bean pesto' style recipe, which can be used as a stir-through pasta sauce. I highly recommend this. In the US, they're combined with sweetcorn to make succotash. I was quite fascinated to read that the European way of preparing beans as an immature and fresh green vegetable is relatively new.

Vicia faba, the broad or fava bean, is one of the oldest known plants in cultivation, dating back to about 6000 BC. It's an ancient staple food of many middle eastern and North African cuisines, and they tend to use it fully mature, once it has dried to a hard bean. In Egypt, it is used in two national dishes - ful madames (literally 'buried beans') and ta'amia, an ancient falafel dish considered superior in every way to the chickpea concoctions favoured further north. In Ethiopia, beans are ground into a flour known as shiro and used as a staple food.

So now I know what to do with all those beans which get missed during harvest and transform into "has beens" as my mother would say.

I grew some of the English variety of Crimson-flowered broad beans last year for the Central Tree Crops Research Trust, and they went very well. The plants suffered a bit toward the end of the summer period from fungal diseases, but the seed crop matured and I harvested about 40 good seeds for every seed I had originally planted. And they were just a marvellous sight in the vegetable patch. The crimson-flowers were highly ornamental. I kept a little of the seed back for planting again this year, but I may not have needed to, as it appears to have self-seeded pretty well from discarded pods.

I found some roasted broad bean snacks from China the other day in my local Asian market. Great tasting, a little addictive. Every bit as good as peanuts.  I'm going to have a go at the following recipe...

If using fresh beans, eliminate the soaking and boiling step and try roasting straight from the pod.

125g dried split broad beans
1 tsp coarse sea salt (iodised)
4 tsp olive oil

1. Soak the beans in water for 8 hours, or overnight.
2. Drain and rinse well. Put in saucepan and cover with 500mls of water.
3. Bring to a boil and boil for 7 minutes to soften them slightly.
4. Drain and allow to cool slightly.
5. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C.
6. Mix the salt and olive oil and toss the beans in the mixture until coated.
7. Spread the beans on a baking tray (greaseproof paper will help to stop them sticking to the tray) and roast for 25 minutes, or until golden.
8. Allow to cool on the tray and try to leave a few for everyone else to try!

It would be worth experimenting with a few different spices as well, such as paprika.


I've been given some purple seeded beans by a gardening friend this year. Not sure what they are. May be the Estonian purple-seeded bean, or the variety Red Epicure which has white flowers. It important to plant different varieties at different times to keep varieties pure, but it could be interesting to see what results from crosses between the different varieties. Can learn a bit from others in this area:
http://topveg.com/2009/08/broad-bean-midwinter-a-new-strain/

Grasping the nettle...

I left some nettle seedlings in my tomato patch this year, in effect reserving some dinner tables for the native Red Admiral butterfly. Over a dozen velvety black caterpillars have survived  - as lovely and prickly as their host plants. I do worry the older diners have eaten more than their share, there is not much left for the younger ones coming through. Nature in all its grand tapestry is not always fair in the allotment of meal portions.

Red Admiral caterpillars on the native nettle, Urtica incisa.

New Zealand Red Admirals used to be a lot more common than they are today, but parasitic wasps and a lack of preferred food plants have diminished their numbers over the past decades. The tree nettle - Urtica ferox - is the preferred food host plant but it's much too ferocious for the average home garden. The smaller growing scrub nettle (U. incisa) is far more accommodating, and seems to be an acceptable alternative to the Red Admiral.

New Zealand Red Admiral butterfly

Nettles are not just for butterflies, of course. They have a long history of use as a medicine and food source for people too. As one of the most nutritious plants on the planet, extremely high in protein, iron, and the vitamins C, E and A, no wonder they clothe themselves in fine, syringe like stinging hairs! Boy can they sting!

I remember as an eight year old living in England, trying to leap the stone wall at the bottom of the garden and clear the nettle patch on the other side. It was always an interplay between the stinging nettles and the dock plants growing nearby. If I got decently stung, I'd chew on a dock leaf and use the saliva and dock sap mixture to calm the red welts on my hands and legs. Seems these days we're not supposed to let kids near stinging nettles just in case they get stung (hear that mum?). Nettles are things to avoid completely if you follow the "Safety in pre-school centres: plants to avoid" guidelines. 

So the only caterpillar pupation a three year old is going to witness is the monarch on its nice and safe swan plant host. Don't get me wrong. I would encourage any person, young or old, to marvel in the life cycle of any butterfly.  And monarchs are the royal celebrities of the butterfly world. Red Admirals are a little more unassuming but every bit as delightful. Cabbage whites, yeah maybe not so much ;)

I think nettles must be in decline in the UK, as there is a National "Be Nice to Nettles Week" to encourage people not to spray their verges and leave some patches of nettles free for the wildlife. Mind you, there is a "week" for everything these days - even a "Rubber Spatula Awareness Week" if my dad was to be believed. Anyway, the Monarch Butterfly New Zealand Trust has prepared a "Beginner's Guide to Nettles" if you happen to be interested in finding out more about supporting nettles in your neighbourhood. Seeds are occasionally offered for sale by Trust members, and some NZ plant nurseries even sell plants. I've tried growing seedlings in pots and hanging baskets, but they don't do nearly as well as in a sheltered spot in the garden, free from an over enthusiastic weeder. 

I'm going to save the seed and collect it this year and plan a larger area for nettles next spring. I'm tempted to harvest the young nettles and try some infusion teas and maybe even nettle soup as a pick-me-up after winter - supposedly very good for the constitution given its high nutritional content. Or maybe I could use the leaves to make a liquid tea to feed the greenhouse plants. Most likely I won't get around to any of that, and there'll be a bigger patch next year for the butterflies.

I will however tell the kids to avoid running through the nettle patch (accepting that nettle stings are something they will get over). I'll show them what a dock plant looks like, and how to chew and spit it, just in case!