Broad beans may seem a rather unlikely subject for a blog post. Especially and lets get this confession out straight away - I don’t even like them! In fact as a child, there were lengthy negotiations as to how many I had to have on my plate. We normally settled on 5. Dad was a great fan of broad beans.

However I took this picture on Tuesday when I was at the Museum of Homelessness and to be honest, on a very cold day in January, these beans gave us real joy. We don’t have a greenhouse (yet) and we don’t have any coldframes either. So when we planted these seeds back in November, we put them in a homemade raised bed and found two framed glass panes that we could balance on top. I had been told that mice like to eat the seeds so we wanted to make it mouse proof as well as warm. We experimented by planting a few seeds in another uncovered raised bed and they never appeared - maybe they were eaten by the mice. Or perhaps by the rats which we do sometimes see! Just before Christmas we had a problem - the seedlings were growing too fast and hitting the glass, so one of our ingenious members found more wood to build up the sides of the raised bed, giving a bit more head room to the seedlings.

On Tuesday, this was the first place I went, since I hadn’t been in the garden for 3 weeks. I shared my excitement with Jess, co-founder of the museum, who to be fair was more excited by the sweetpea seedlings which are just out of shot in this photo. I have read about people sowing them in Autumn, but never done it before myself, and they are one of her favourite flowers. We agreed that there is just something so positive about seeing new growth. A little later, standing by the beans, I was joined by another member of the community. He was having a difficult day, being woken at 5am in your hostel by someone screaming is not conducive to anyone’s mood. As he put it - ‘when you are autistic with ADHD it really impedes your ability to do anything the next day’. He described how he starts the day with a certain number of ‘spoons’ to do things and this morning he barely had one spoon. But as we stood in front of those broad beans memories came back to him of growing these seeds at school. He laughed at the memory of watching the roots go down into the jam jar and the leaves shoot up. He talked about the importance of this Museum of Homelessness garden. It is a place he comes to whenever he can because it is calm, its restorative.

So maybe it doesn’t matter whether anyone will actually want to eat the broad beans, assuming we as novices continue to nurture them to the point of pods. Though it does point to the question of how do you decide what to grow in a vegetable patch. We look after plants we love so maybe we need a vote to decide what to grow. I do remember how Kathy Slack (and do check out her Tales from the Veg Patch on Substack) said if she was to come back as a vegetable she would come back as a broad bean because of that wonderful furry coat that the beans are snuggling inside. I feel sure that Kathy will be able to share some great broad bean recipes so maybe we will all come to love them.

Have a lovely weekend

Sally

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