Broad Beans in my Organic Garden Cope With Some Frost

This is a follow-up on how my broad (fava) beans are doing, original post here.

We get some frost here in the Barossa Valley – but not all that many. Broad beans seem to suffer a little with the frost. The top growth wilts over and it can look pretty bad first thing in the morning (notice the grass is white and crunchy).

But the great news is that most times broad beans will warm up during the day and recover, kind of like nothing happened. This photo below was taken about a week after the photo above and you can see that they’re growing vigorously, with lots of flowers… so we’ll have lots of broad beans this season. Yum!

They’ll grow about another half again in height, so I’ll need to add another string line for support a bit higher up, otherwise they’ll bend over with the weight of the growing beans.

They’re pretty easy to grow too, so great if you’re still learning about organic gardening. Just prepare the soil by adding some organic fertiliser like complete D or blood and bone and lightly fork or rake it into the soil. Add your bean seeds ( I always save mine from the previous year) to moist soil, spaced evenly, don’t water for a least a couple of days.

All you have to do then is wait. Yes, I know it’s not easy waiting for seeds to poke through, but broad beans are almost guarenteed to come up for you in about two weeks, depending on the weather.

Happy Organic Gardening, Healthy Living…