E Nordlie

William Bronson wrote: Well I swung by and harvested some of the beans.
I hope to plant them this fall and begin my landrace.
Thank you again for sharing this knowledge with me!

You're welcome! Broad beans seem to lend themselves pretty well to landracing; based on seed colour, shape and size crosses happen regularly. Impossible to quantify exactly, but it is noticeable!

William Bronson wrote:We let this crop continue hoping for a seed crop.
We have had a lot of rain, heat, and unusually cool periods.
Now it's started rotting, black spots everywhere.
I'll be cutting it out and composting it.

I'm not sure those are rotting. Broad bean pods do turn black and sad-looking when they're completely ripe, and just before they turn all black (or dark brown) they are quite spotty.

Open a couple of pods and have a look at the beans! If they are fine but not completely dry you can either leave them to dry out on the plant, or if wet weather is coming get them under roof. Either the whole plants or just the pods, whichever is easier in your situation. If they are already completely dry just harvest them whenever convenient, but sooner rather than later - the pods may start to split, and the beans may fall out or go bad if rain gets into the split pods.

The whole plant will often look diseased when the seeds are ripe, in my experience. I usually find the seed looks just as good or better when harvested late, from shabby looking plants, and I have always had more than 90 % of seed I saved myself sprout when planted. Close to 100% actually, I can basically count on any broad bean that I harvested myself to sprout and grow well.

Broad beans are generally very tolerant of bad weather, and even if the seeds end up looking a bit spotty or wrinkly they are likely to be perfectly fine to resow. Especially for green manure or a cover crop!  

If you do open a few pods, and the seed is actually bad, I'll be very curious - I realise we likely have very different climates, but apart from drought when they are flowering they seem to cope with nearly any conditions. Maybe you'd show us what you find?

Bearing in mind that the species may be completely different, I've never seen black aphids on any sort of grass . In previous years there have been some on my broad beans, but not very bad. The funny thing is there are two plants in my garden that are black aphid favourites: foxglove and wormwood. Instinctively I'd have thought they were the least attractive to pests.. The wormwood usually has grown quite a bit before any vegetables come up, and is attacked by the aphids quite early in the season. Ladybugs and little wasps find them a week or two after the aphids become noticeable, and some seasons the aphids seem unable to expand much. Other seasons the wormwood plants are visibly stunted by the number of aphids, but they have not been able to infest any of the vegetables much. I do have some flowering plants that are supposed to attract hoverflies and wasps, and help control pests that way, but the relatively early aphids on the wormwood is where I actually see a lot of predatory insects.
I did have too much wormwood at one point though, they grew in between other plants and seemed to keep especially pumpkins from thriving. It may have been competition, but possibly allelopathy.

Here, for comparison
Natural pest control broad bean beetles

I stumbled on to this while searching for something else, but wanted to say that I've used more or less exactly the same selection method outlined in the first post to get rid of broad bean weevils, and it seems to be working well. Over the last years I have generally seen very few except for when I have brought in new seed to add to my mix - and as the weevils are supposed to have wild hosts here too, I think the reduction in damage is due to increased resistance rather than my having managed to decimate the population.

I've only ever grown grain as small scale experiments, but even at the smallest scale it is quite clear that the different varieties/cultivars/strains/landraces of for  example oats have slightly different preferences for soil and growing conditions in general. What I mean is that even if oat as a species has different requirements than wheat or barley, there is quite a lot of variety within the species, and it may pay to try as many varieties as possible.
Unfortunately, so called hulless oats are seldom completely hulless, which may or may not be a problem depending on the intended use. I guess trying many varieties and being quite selective if you are saving your own seed would help.

You say some logs are starting to decay, which probably means they are damp? If you are not in a hurry, you may want to get them off the ground to let them dry out more, they would be a lot lighter. Depending on the size, species and general conditions it may be months before there is a real difference, though. A good steel digging bar / pry bar would be useful - I don't know if there is an exact english language equivalent for the tool I am thinking of, they are usually about 1,2-1,5 m long, octagonal or round for most of the length, but the last 1/4 or so of one end is square, thicker than the rest, and wedge shaped at the very end. They are super useful for manipulating heavy stuff, like getting stones out of the ground or into a specific position, taking out or breaking up stumps, or in this case, lifting the end of a log or rolling it over.
I'm not very familiar with non-metric units, but 8' seems to be something like 2,5-3 m, and you are not moving them more than a few hundred meters (very roughly the same as yards?) - in which case, by far the lowest tech solution, rolling them, seems completely doable. Unless the logs are too crooked to roll or even tip over repeatedly, or the ground is very uneven.
I would not try to pull them on a tarp, it would likely be ruined (and leave little pieces of plastic all over). Unless you get frozen ground and good snow cover there, and are willing to wait until then!

I just wanted to say this is a project where I am really looking forward to updates, and in a way updates far ahead are more exciting than ones in the near future - although those are great also I really really hope to read about this next year too, and the one after, and in ten years!

Josh Warfield wrote: When you say "broad beans" you mean the same thing as "fava beans," scientific name Vicia faba? I have tried sowing those in spring, and they all wilted and died by early to mid summer. Should I be sowing them in the fall instead, around the same time as the peas?

I think broad bean is the usual name for Vicia faba in british english, and possibly in other english varieties as well. They are able to overwinter in certain climates, but as far as I know not here in Norway. I think certain varieties of broad bean are better able to overwinter, but exactly what conditions they need I don't know. I have sown them in fall  a few times, as a green manure/cover crop. They survive a bit of frost, but never made it through a winter here. Could be too cold, too damp, too dark, or just too long a period of any of these conditions? For what it's worth, some late sown peas have survived here about as long as the broad beans - which could mean that broad beans might survive the winter where you are, since peas have. Worth a try!

Matthew LeVan wrote:
3. Re: burying wood. I definitely don't want wood floats. Not nearly as tasty as root beer floats in the summer... But perhaps my slope isn't steep enough to worry about wood floats?

I don't have personal experience with real hugelbeds, but I have worked a lot with different types of soil and drainage conditions. I would only be worried about the wood floating up if the soil drained so poorly that there was a real risk that the trench actually could fill with water, which seems very unlikely if it is as sandy as it looks. Unless there is some kind of less permeable layer right below? Clay, iron concretions (hardpan?) or more or less permanent ground water?
Even if the trench could fill with water, the wood would have to be quite dry, and light to begin with, in order to actually lift the soil that you heap onto it. Even semi-saturated wood can barely float, let alone lift significant weight. I'm not doubting it can and has happened, but it has got to take some very specific circumstances - dry, light wood, light soil on top, trenches that fill almost completely and quite fast.