counting beans

So what do you do on a rainy Sunday at work after your second drenching of the day? Put all your wet gear in the drying room and head for the shed to do a bit of tidying up and sorting out. I started off by checking through the all the trays of stored potatoes, shallots and garlic that we have put away to replant next spring – my nose was telling me there were a few mouldy specimens lurking within. In the middle of all the spuds I came across a couple of trays of Martock beans, still in their pods and waiting to be processed. It’s the medieval broad bean that we grow in the garden of our Tudor longhouse – smaller and more modest than its modern descendants, more like a black-eyed pea or a small borlotto.

As I sat for a peaceful hour shucking them from their pods I was reminded of the book I am currently reading ‘Down to Earth – a guide to simple living’, by Rhonda Hetzel. She writes an inspirational blog of the same name, detailing her life with her husband and family in Queensland, Australia. She talks about mindfulness and finding pleasure in self-reliance and simple tasks – relearning the skills that our ancestors took for granted and practising them as a subversive act. Now I don’t know who my medieval ancestors were, but from my height and colouring I’d say they were Northern European (we grow our bones long in my family). At this time every year they would have been sitting around shucking beans, ready to store them safe and dry, away from mice and mould. With every satisfying rattly plunk of bean into bucket, there is a feeling of another morsel saved, another mouth fed.

My two little trays of beans yielded about 1.5 kilos of dry beans - that's 20 portions of food. I haven't tried cooking Martock beans before, so I decided it was time for a taste test. After a long soak - me, half an hour in a hot bath and the beans overnight in a bowl of cold water, I set about cooking them…

A little research* revealed that not only were these humble beans a staple in Tudor times, they were feeding Iron Age Brits, and are still highly prized in Middle Eastern cuisine. This what the Pharaohs were eating for breakfast. Field beans are still grown in Britain as part of an organic crop rotation - but the beans are mostly exported to Arab countries to be made into the Egyptian classic Ful Mesdames (the 'ful' is pronounced 'fool'). The recipe has many variations - but the essential ingredients seem to be cooked beans mashed with a little garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and cumin. Somewhere between hummus and refried beans it has a delicious earthy comfort that can be dressed up with any number of garnishes like harissa, crumbled feta or parsley. Here it is in its naked state - tonight it will be served with the traditional accompaniments of hard boiled eggs and flatbreads.

*In the course of my research I came across the fantastic Hodmedods which has everything you could wish to know about British grown pulses. There are also loads of recipes and an online shop that sells all kinds of exciting products like roasted peas with horseradish (wasabi peas), and salted roasted fava beans (habas fritas). You've got to love an iron age bar snack right?!?!

beanfeast

It's the time of year for peas and broad beans.  Alys Fowler tweeted the other day that she likes fava beans best out of all the broads - they are smaller than a modern bean, closer to their 'field bean' ancestors. They're what half the world grows and dries - knowing that our western obsession with eating everything green means there is nothing in the larder for winter.  But of course you can eat them green - the ensuing twitterings made claims for their superior flavour and creaminess…

..and who am I to argue with the lovely Alys?

So Fowler may favour a fava,

but maybe I can out-nerd her on the history beans front?

would like to say that I individually taste tested them 

- but I didn't, just mixed them up and ate them,

and they were good.

sticks and string

It's time to get supports in for all my tall heritage veggies, (shortness has been bred into modern varieties to make them easier to manage).  These 'Champion of England' peas will easily get to 2 metres - so although these might look like the most optimistic pea sticks in the world, they'll be fully covered in a few weeks. They need to be strong enough to hold the weight of the crop without keeling over at the crucial moment. I kept lots of nice sturdy bits of hazel from the hedge I laid back in January - perfect for the job and I love how they look. Plenty of twiggy bits for the peas to wrap their little tendrils around as they sprint skywards.

On Monday I found myself short of a few sticks to finish the supports for my broad beans. Now I wouldn't normally disappear up the woods on a busy bank holiday (honest boss if you're reading this), but the siren call of an hour's peace among the trees was hard to resist. So I took some loppers and set off to cut some ash poles.

Here they are in situ with cats cradle string.

The beans on the right are a month ahead.

I'm going to learn to make string out of nettles to help build our new Celtic village.

That's exciting (if you're me).

My arms are covered in nettle rash from pulling them out of the hedges.

Might as well make use of the little buggers - too tough to eat now, so string it is...

plot to plate

High on the list of FAQs at the museum where I work must surely be ‘What do you do with all the vegetables from the cottage gardens?’ Ever since I have been there we have sold the produce on an ad hoc basis to visitors and staff, but the imbalance between quantity produced (small) and visitor numbers (high), means that we fail to address the public perception that we aren’t ‘doing anything with it’.  On a busy day in high summer 30 people might go home delighted with their bag of peas/punnet of gooseberries while the other 5,870 go home thinking it's a shame we don't sell the produce. Also I can categorically state that nobody has come for a family day out at the museum wanting to carry a 2 kilo cabbage around in the pushchair!

Earlier in the year a chance remark from the director of the museum, that the chef would like some herbs to use in the restaurant, set me thinking that maybe the time was right to try a Plot to Plate project where the produce gets used in the on-site restaurant. I realise this is not a fantastically original idea - lots of places do it already. But their visitor numbers are mostly small compared to ours, and a lot of them shut in the winter.  So after a bit of gentle pushing and shoving on my part, we're running it as a pilot scheme this year. 

I had a very productive walk around with the chef, good for both sides to think about the practicalities. The great news is that he's very interested in the things that have always been  impossible challenging to sell, like cabbages, turnips and prickly skinned cucumbers. Conversely, not so bothered about the peas and broad beans - too much prep so they buy frozen. He also made excited faces when I said things like 'quince', 'cooking pears' and 'kale', which was extremely gratifying.

It's been a gentle start, with a few kilos of rhubarb a week and some trays of mixed herbs

I've even got some new scales

and down on the farm our new chooky girls have started laying 

so it's time to get organised and start sending the eggs to the shop

the financial return on these items isn't huge

but it's part of a bigger story

and it feels like the right thing to do

and that feels good…

when is a bean not a bean?

This week it's been all about the beans*

A rainy afternoon on Thursday gave me the chance to shell all the beans that I harvested to store. We grow a few heritage varieties: 

• Martock - a medieval 'field bean'
• White Windsor - a broad bean from 1720
• Crimson Flowered - a broad bean that produces deep red seed coats (and a few green ones)**

Then a sunny morning on Friday saw me picking the last of the runners to eat green. The rest can carry on to fatten up their seeds to eat as 'shelly beans' (mature 'wet' beans that don't need soaking overnight), or dry to 'haricot' stage. Once dry they will store for long periods, but need the full soak and boil to bring them back to life. (All mature beans will give you a seriously bad tummy if you don't cook them thoroughly - some beans have higher levels of a toxin, which is destroyed by cooking, than others). Here is a cautionary tale to help you remember.

I find it strange that as a nation of enthusiastic tinned baked bean eaters, all of which are imported, (Navy beans aren't grown commercially in this country), we are mostly unable to get our heads round the concept of mature bean as food source. Google 'Broad Beans' and you'll come up with a list of names that demonstrates their cultural spread and importance:

broad beans, horse beans, windsor beans, fava beans, habas, gigantes, ful... 

..the list goes on and on.

The rest of the world knows that this is where it's at, nutritionally speaking - there's far more bang for your buck in the bean than the green pod. Grocery stores in Italy stock bulging sacks of dried beans, purchased by enthusiastic Nonnas keen to feed their families bean puree with turnip tops. These are the beans that Northamptonshire poet John Clare (1793-1864), was referring to when he wrote the lines:

A beanfield full in blossom smells as sweet

As Araby, or groves of orange flowers;

Black-eyed and white, and feathered to one's feet,

How sweet they smell in morning's dewy hours!

But we eye them with suspicion, mentally consign them to seed packets in the garden centre, and buy imported green beans from Kenya in the middle of winter.

Now then - what's for lunch......?!?!

*(apologies for the slightly over elaborate collage - but I've just discovered PicMonkey!)

** Sciencey bit on dominant and recessive genes in seed coat colours in Broad Beans.

thorny issues

This week has been a race to get all my hedges cut and gardens tidied up, before taking a couple of weeks off work. Meanwhile, the gooseberry bushes have produced a bumper crop that needed harvesting. All the sunshine we have been having has made them sweeter than usual, so my sales policy of handing them out to passers-by to try, has really been paying off. Even the kids have been happily scoffing them straight off the bush.

But gooseberry picking and hawthorn trimming in a heatwave means I haven't been wearing the requisite amount of body armour. The scratched up state of my hands and forearms is eliciting that, 'if you ever need to talk about anything....' *tilts head to one side* meaningful look.

Have you seen the thorns on a gooseberry?

I know!

and the fruit hangs underneath, protected by all those spikes.

worth it though

followed by the perfect antidote for my sore fingers..

the cool, velvety pod lining of a broad bean.

that's summer right there!

the promise of things to come

A little warmth, a little moisture, and the gardens are bursting into action.  You turn your back for what seems like just five minutes, and come back to find things have grown a foot.  I live in a world of sticks and brown string at this time of year - moving from one garden to another making sure that everything is getting the support it needs to hold the weight of the crop as it develops.

Crimson flowered broad beans

pea tendrils reaching for support

It's a time of promise - the first of the salad leaves that I sowed directly into the ground are nearly ready to start harvesting.

Spotted Bloody Cos lettuce

The cucumbers in the hotbed and my pumpkin patch babies are starting to rev up. They throw out their tendrils at such a speed, that it seems like you could hear them squeaking as they grow if you stood still for long enough. 

baby cucumber (with aphids - c'mon you ladybirds!)

The first tiny fruits are setting on the cucumbers - my dreams of making my own brine fermented pickles were fuelled by a visit to the Wisley bookstore, where I treated myself to Alys Fowler's lovely new book Abundance. (The fact that we're about to rip our kitchen out and fill the house with brick dust seems like a mere detail).

pears

In the orchard the fruitlets are swelling and changing colour...

Cornish Gillyflower apples

..and in the fruit gardens the gooseberries hang like jewels - still rock hard, eye wateringly sour and guarded by the most ferocious prickles. I'll be wearing full body armour when it's time to pick them - and even then I'll end up covered in the kind of lacerations that look like they might be a cry for help.

Soon I should be harvesting plenty of produce to show you...

..things are looking promising!