eggs & tea blog

A while ago, i planted some cherry tomato bushes (rumor has it fruit flies rarely bother the small ones) and some fava beans (as a cover crop / chicken food experiment.) Here’s an update. The tomatoes grew up nice and fast, made flowers, started to set a couple fruit, and then…. blight:

You can see that the ends of the plant are still bright green healthy and flowering, but the older parts (including where the fruit should be ripening) quickly die off. Result: no tomatoes at all. Frustrating.

As a cover crop, my thicket of fava bean plants turned out wildly successful:

Interestingly, they failed when planted in a thin row (succumbing to aphids and other problems) but as a dense array, they did great. Strength in numbers, i suppose. I even dared to hope that this time, i might get actual beans. The plants all made beautiful flowers, and a lot of bees visited. However, at 5-6 months of age, there was just that – tons of flowers, but no sign of beans forming.

On April 26, i gave up and started to pull them all up, for use as compost. That’s when i noticed that a couple of the larger plants …. actually had some beans on them!

So, i left most of the patch standing. Maybe they just need a lot of time. Maybe i planted them at the wrong time of year (winter… but they are supposed to be a cold-season crop… at least in a temperate climate.) Maybe they don’t like my elevation or soil or something (they are supposed to fix nitrogen, but i don’t think they are, next time i will try inoculating.) I’ll leave them up long enough to find out whether we’ll end up with a reasonable amount of beans.

Related posts:

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This entry (Permalink) was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 1:16 am and is filed under crops, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.