Beautiful, folksy, hand drawn, almost lost/out of print booklet about Fava Beans.
Shared by Nick Routledge.
Look at those lovely recipes. Report back on what you cook!
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A great book! I had been looking for it for a long time, I found it recently on great lakes staple seeds website—which now has a sizeable ‘digital resources’ section:
It would be cool to have a zine/pamphlet book for a range of different vegetables… but this one also ‘works’ because Ianto Evans was especially passionate about favas.
He also has a book on ‘natural building’ (The Hand-Sculpted House) that has impressive/detailed illustrations and is nice to flip through.
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What a find! Some gems here. @Lowell_McCampbell have you seen this? Lots of old small grains books. Wish I had more time to read.
I think we should write one, open source, a chapter on each species, including center of origin and domestication story, plus all the things we want to know about like pollination distance and outcrossing rate, and recipes that favor diversity and colors.
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I’d be interested !
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Cool! I have to make some brochures on grains for an event in May, so I might use these for research.
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The event, Lowell?
It is the spring farm tour for North FL and South/Central Georgia. I will be at a small market farm nearby. It is an effort put on by the Millstone Institute and other patrons to help keep it organized.
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Good to know what you’re up to!
Here’s what I was planting today!
Never got favas in later than mid-February before and I don’t know anybody who has, in these parts. No idea how they’ll do. I went to the Thompsons & Morgan site in the UK for reassurance. They go as late as April with plantings in the UK. Who knows, maybe a selection event in the making.
Some years ago I began planting favas in the spring, as distinct from the mid-October window, which used to work - getting plants established prior to the heavy weather, but not too big to be susceptible to harsh mid-winter conditions, especially snow. Then, two years in succession, my entire crop of breeding material was completely annihilated by consecutive severe snow and cold events. A real body blow considering how much I loved that population.
Planting in February, as I now typically do, I’ve never lost a crop to weather. I’ll still throw the horse beans into an overwintering cover crop for nitrogen fixing, but the large-seeded beans are simply too precious to risk.
As per the Ianto-Aprovecho connection, it feels quite poetic to be getting these in at the Aprovecho Research Center, where I now live, as resident gardener. The stove builders who emerged out of the early Apro experiment, peeled out of the original site, but kept the name. The original Aprovecho site, now renamed ‘Center for Rural Livelihoods’, about 25 minutes away, is where this material originally issues from. Bringing the story home, in a sense.
I’d be curious about bringing some of your material north, Julia.
n
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