Beans Means Greens

Hardy and easy to grow, fab fava beans are the perfect comfort food

- Jennifer Stackhouse

BROAD BEAN

Common name: Broad bean, fava bean

Botanic name: Vicia faba

Family: Fabaceae (bean family)

Aspect & soil: Sun; well-drained soil, shelter from wind

Best climate: Cool, temperate

Habit: Annual climber or bush

Propagation: Seed, seedling

Difficulty: Easy

When you eat broad beans you are consuming some of the oldest veggies known to cultivation. These wide, flat beans, native to the Mediterranean region, have a long history as a cultivated veggie. Remains found in excavations in northern Israel have been dated to 6800–6500 BCE and they are also known from ancient sites in Egypt.

There are two ways to eat broad beans. They can be boiled or steamed whole when small and immature, or allowed to mature then shelled like peas so only the bean itself is eaten.

I prefer broad beans at this later stage, but they are fiddly to prepare for eating. Once the beans mature into the big green pod that gives them their name, they taste better podded before they are cooked. I also remove the tough outer skin from the cooked bean to reveal the bright-green bean inside.

Eating whole beans — young pod and all — provides the most nutritious meal as they are rich in vitamin C, potassium, iron and, if you consume the pod, dietary fibre.

Broad beans are an expensive vegetable to buy, so growing your own from seed is a cheap way to enjoy a delicious and nutritious vegetable for little outlay.

As broad beans crop in winter and spring, they are also a valuable plant to be harvested when other winter crops are over but summer veggies are yet to produce.

They do best in cold to temperate climates. Plants may grow but fail to form crops in subtropical zones.