Fava Bean Projects

It’s a difficult climate.

Summer is short and cool, with very long days (no true night between end of May to early August due to latitude).

I have regular frosts well into June. Safe time to plant out frost sensitive stuff is around midsummer. I like living on the edge and plant much, much sooner than that and cover if I must, but it’s risky. People in my region plant out potatoes last week of May!

I have my first killing frost end of August sometime, but I can and have had killing frosts as early as 8 Aug. It usually is a rather hard frost down to -2 or so and then we get another month before daily frosty nights set in. By mid September you have frost on the ground every single night. Sometime in November my ground starts to freeze deep and over the winter it freezes down to a depth of about 1.5m called ”tjäle”. It gives out around early April. My garlic in a good year is up during the first week of April. In a bad year like the last 2 has been, mid May or end of May.

Summer days are cool, 22 deg C is ”hot” here and in a lucky year I may get a week of that. Lately usually June can be ”warm” and by that I mean 20-22 C peaks; if 25 it’s in the news as we’re having a heat wave. Such stretches of a week or two at most are possible. Normal non-heatwave summer temp daily max is 15-19C, that is, I celebrate if it’s 20 and want to plant banana trees.

Nights are always cool; specifically where I grow I pretty much never have nights warmer than 9-10C. With climate change, weird things like some balmy 15deg nights can happen, in that case a couple days in a row and then back to 10 or under. Throughout 90% of my growing season my nights are single digit in Celsius.

Local frost is possible pretty much any time of the year. We thought for a long time that July was safe (and about the only safe month) but not even that :pensive: This year I measured 0.5deg on the 3 July! I was very lucky that not all I grow was wiped out as several people around me within a one-hour radius had severe frost damage.

With climate change it’s been changing for the cooler and wetter. Now several summers in a row have been even cooler and much, much wetter than before. Usually the hotter it is ”everywhere” in Europe the cooler and wetter it is up here. This year we had seven weeks of rain and counting.

Humidity in the air is constantly high, to the point where my selection criteria for all crops I grow are changing towards fungal resistance. Nothing ever dries down so when I find a fava or a pea that actually dries down all the way into black or brown I celebrate. Things tend to rot and catch mold easily. We often joke that we could grow rice, had it been just a tad warmer here.

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Wow! That sounds like a challenging climate, for sure!

Ohhh, now that you mention mold, that could very easily be what the black stuff on some of my fava beans was.

My location for sure comes with its very real challenges but I can still grow most stuff. Two crops that have failed completely are maize and melons and the like, of course. I started with a population derived from Painted Mountain, from a corn breeder friend but not even that managed. It gave me tassels mid August. Froze ten days later :cold_face::stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Cucumbers yes, but only sativus, C. melo is a hopeless one.

Cucurbita pepo YES and have my own population I will eventually document here. Goal is to have a pepo that tastes excellent both as a summer squash (check) AND doubles as a winter squash like the number one mom and origo in my population in case I missed the harvest window, but with more colors and shapes (I get bored easily, so, crops must entertain me with a number of shapes and colors or I will drop them). Several promising candidates this year. We’ll see. I’m hopeful. Just no frost for another two or three weeks please :cold_face::pray:t2:

Potatoes set berries spontanously and abundantly. I have more TPS including from obscure, never-sets-a-berry types (I collect potatoes) than I, my entire family with their families and all my friends can grow in a lifetime. As to why, IDK, since I don’t have the room to grow them out, but one day! I freeze them for that day. I have TPS from Puca Quitish and the like. Like it ”never” sets seed. Well bring it to me here and it will… and I won’t even have to coax it, it just will on its own. Last year I harvested five Puca berries that set spontaneously!… Well it ins defense it was planted in the middle of several equally obscure varieties. Surely it found some compatible pollen from there.

TGS is something I’ve ben trying for several years now and perhaps this year, pehaps!… I try every year even if I fail again…

I now have a kale seed patch but it’s not overwintered plants (which all froze to death as we got -28C without snow which stayed and plants never recovered from that) but plants I deliberately shocked, stressed into bolting in their first year by sowing them 2 months earlier than normal and exposing them to as much environmental stress as possible. One must be tricky when Nature refuses to cooperate!

Potato onions from seed, big yes, and I have flowers as well right now, going for own seed.

Everything Brassica, not just kale, big yes.
Radishes and turnips, including winter radishes (on my way to create a population there as well, long story).

Peas, yes and yes, and have my own population based mainly on ”gråärtor” (gray peas if that’s the proper term).

And a lot more. Fava beans is a huge one for me but this year, trusting an El niño summer (I couldn’t have been more wrong!…) I also tested a rather wide mix of Phaseolus bush beans, much wider than I usually even dare to think of, and I’m very near mature seeds now.

Sometimes things will work out anyway even if it looks really bad. Nature will find a way.

I shall start documenting some of the stuff. I just like to grow a lot more than posting about them :joy:

Heck, I even grow, and cross, tomatoes! This summer has really sucked for them but some summers I drown in toms.

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It sounds like you’ve worked very hard to find (and make) crops that can grow well for you. That’s awesome!

It’s very intriguing that potatoes are more willing to go to seed for you than for most people. It sounds like you may be a very valuable collaborator for anyone who wants to get seeds from a variety they love and want to breed!

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Painted mountain is cold hardy, but not very fast. My experience is that it’s about 10 days or so slower than fastest grain corn I have grown. Yukon chief sweet corn seemed even faster than that. I could send you some seeds during off season. Could also send you some wilding panamorous tomato seeds and maybe something else that comes to mind.

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Hey, thanks! @Justin invited me to come here, so eventually I did. I’m totally into sharing. Much of what I have I acquired just like that.

Don’t want to too OFF here, sorry about my previous entry, should go in its own thread which I still haven’t made :face_with_open_eyes_and_hand_over_mouth:. I will get back to you regarding those offers :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:. Just wanted to put here that I forgot the name of the other one I also tried, population derived from Gaspé. Took me a while to go through my notes to find the name.


Some harvest pictures!

Just some favorites, some colors :star_struck:


Some OFFTOPIC Phaseolus beans (beginnigns of my own grex: seeds from various sources, poured together and planted totally mixed up) have actually produced dried beans for me, for the first time ever in so many colors. These are just the very first ones that dried up fully on the plants despite that it’s been raining for two months. Seriously, it could stop now so i could harvest. Quite a pain to harvest from mud and I have only so much floor, shelf etc space to dry everything. Anyway, pix! I can’t believe my eyes!

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Gaspe I have no experience of, but based on what I have read I feel like it’s about as fast as atomic orange, but there may be differences of cold tolerance and one or other might do better in cool. Are those phaleas vulgaris? I have had trouble having them ripen in time, but they do just barely. Hotter summers had some first in early august, but mostly and main harvest late august to september, if i can wait to harvest that long because of moisture. Maybe they aren’t that bothered about cold and just need time. We can carry on this conversation later on or in different topic. No rush.

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Hey, lovely to see you here! I know you will make the community richer! :slight_smile:

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Those are gorgeous fava beans! I’m excited for you with the Phaseolus beans, too.

Have you ever tried oca, or other Andean root crops? Maybe if potatoes like to flower and make seeds for you, you may be able to get seeds from other Andean root crops that are way more shy about flowering. If so, that would be really, really, really neat.

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Oca doesn’t work in far north. It’s highly daylenght sensitive and only starts forming roots when days are around 12h which about same time or after first frosts that kill the plants. Unless they are protected enough which might not even be possible very long or long enough. Flowering is also daylenght sensitive and personally I only had some sporadic flowering during summer, but not enough to cross pollinate. Which also don’t even work between all varieties. You would need the right pair to cross pollinate. Some people are working on the daylenght sensitivity on lower latitudes, but it seems like that’s not so easy in oca. It came to europe 200 years ago, but has failed to move north unlike potato which spread trough the continent in less than that. Even though potato also started as daylight sensitive crop.

Makes sense. So they’d probably have to be a greenhouse crop, in order to keep them alive long enough to form those tubers and seeds. And greenhouse space, if you even have any of it, is precious.

Even greenhouse would likely need heating, especially as far north as cathy. Based on what I have read even october might be too early for harvest and by november days are just barely above freezing and nights might be -20C (-4F) and often -10C (14F). Even greenhouse would be likely to get frosts in september. Some years simple cloth might keep them alive long enough for harvest, but colder years are common enough for it not to practical. Less so further north. Definetely would have potential if daylenght sensitivity could be turned off as they grew greens nicely over summer.

(Nods.) Yeah, I wondered if that might be a limitation on greenhouses that far north. My suspicion was that anywhere that gets really cold in winter probably gets pretty cold by early fall, too.

Yes, but even more so in far north were sun doesn’t get high enough to warm. In a month our sun will as high mid day as it’s where you live mid winter and it just keeps getting weaker.

Oh, Andean root crops I heard. Did someone just push a button on me :sunglasses::joy:

I actually did grow oca and yacon.

Yacon succeeds in a good year — in that it yields, but it is gigantic plants and the fact that I often get frost already in August means I must build a 7-8’ high frame around them and cover with tarps for the critical nights, which is no small feat considering I grow in a fully exposed, windy place. I also grow quite far from my home so I had to go there twice a day, first to cover them for the nights, then to uncover in the mornings. Just not doable. And they’d start to flower end of September or so. Too little, too late…

This last winter most of my rhizomes sadly froze in storage, and I decided not to plant the rest, unwilling to put in that much work again. In the end, sometime mid July I planted them out of guilt, like, I was about to kill specimens of a precious Andean crop by not planting them, so I did… I will ship them off to a friend in the South of the country who wants to try once I harvested one last time.

Anyway, have fun seeing my pix…

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I have also grown oca and I went into even greater lengths trying to get that one last into my November. I grew them in large fabric pots all summer. I then prepared a hotbed with fresh horse manure on top of which I placed the pots and built a tunnel around the whole thing. I did get them into mid November, surviving regular -15C (5F) outside temps. Notice that since the Sun is so low at that time, notice on the Gaisma screenshot how few hours per day that it’s up at all, it’s that cold for a much longer time than on more friendly latitudes… Also, the Sun has no strength to speak of at that time of the year and the harvest on 15Nov was reflecting just that. A lot of work for tiny stuff just enough for me to be able to share to a much more friendly location so they are growing now in the South of Hungary, near the Croatian border.

Some pix to entertain… so you all put me in the right place (”this person is probably insane”) :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes::see_no_evil:

Was it worth it? :grinning:

Yes, of course. Now I know what it takes and what the return is.

By the way I accidentally did have the right varieties, according to Cultivariable Bill that happened to be compatible based on pix he saw and I did get spontaneous flowers in the summer. Tried to hand-pollinate, but all flowers just dropped. So that was my oca adventure. Maybe I will try again at some point if I ever get a proper greenhouse and nearer to where I live so I don’t have to do this cover/uncover twice a day.

…I’ll go harvest some more favas. More reliable producers at this latitude abandoned by all Gods :rofl:

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I have also considered growing in pots and bringing them to my classed balcony before frosts. It stays frost free there to november or december, but it would some trouble as my plot is couple kilometers away. Would need to have something that can produce in october and then it would be much more practical to protect with cloth. I’m not sure if any is really that worth it if i can’t get flowers. Maybe better let someone in a bit more favourable climate to make new varieties that would a step ahead. Yacon is a bit easier for me as frosts come early september at earliest usually (there is always slight change early frosts in august). Is that rocotos you have? For some reason I have had trouble with them. Might be hot and dry summers we have had.

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Yep, they are rocotos. I habitually overwinter them indoors in 40-60L pots and I have them for 2-3 years at a time. Should sow for next year soon… this year I skipped them altogether due to space constraints.

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One part of my fava chaos. Harvesting now the majority due to voles. I must prune or harvest enouh to see the ground between rows. They’re mostly ready anyway so I can cut away a lot of green here.

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Hi All Fava lovers! This is a photo of a sample of year 2 of my fava bean landrace. Amazing colors showing up! I’m the steward of this crop for GoingToSeed (as well as for the chickpea crop) so if you had a good harvest of any of those crops, consider sending some of your seeds as a donation so that we can distribute them to others who would want them. Deadline is November 24. Here is the link with the details of how to to do that : Crops for 2024 – Going To Seed

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I was thinking about planting my fava beans tomorrow.

I have attached an image of a weather forecast.

Could anybody advise? I might wait until the frost days are over. It will get warm very fast soon then hot.

FYI, these are the GTS 2024 favas. Thank you all who made this happen. It looks like online research is saying they don’t like temperatures above 80 degrees. Can anyone confirm? If that is true, I may need to plant now, especially if the grow period is 3 months.

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