legumes

Burra Maluca wrote:

Brian White wrote:The situation is bleak ... because nitrates are the biggest  problem

If enough of us switch our diets so that we all eat more beans, it might be possible to prevent the cost of food going up 10x.

Hi Burra,  not sure if this is the forum to ask, but do you grow your own beans, peas or lentils? Legumes form the backbone of our diet and I was wondering if there are any tips you can give for growing them in our part of the world. I think we share similar weather conditions- cold winters with some rain, hot, dry summers with ferociuos winds all year round. My husband loves fresh peas and I like fresh beans, but I just can't get them to grow so I'm cautious about allocating any of my meagre gardening space to grow store legumes. A local farmer gave me some fresh chickpeas a few yers back, so they do grow here but not sure if  they need to be innoculated like some legumes. What about lentils?

When I first moved to Portugal over twenty years ago, the place had been abandoned for decades, just ploughed up every year to keep it 'clean'. We couldn't grow any legumes at all! I can't remember where we got it or what it was called, but we got some sort of root inoculant and soaked fava (broad bean) seed in it and grew a little patch of them just fine. The next year we dug up some of the soil from that patch, mixed it with water and soaked a bigger batch of bean seed in it and planted some in the original patch and the rest in 'new' patches. They all grew fine. And over the next few years all kinds of peas and beans started to be able to grow.

The ones that didn't do well were the 'runner bean' types, Phaseolus coccineus. As far as I can tell they won't pollinate during very hot weather (something to do with pollen tubes not growing?) so although the plant grows you don't get any beans off them. I did attempt a breeding project with them once, including the Portuguese feijoca which is the same species but grown as perennial for the dry bean. I never really got anywhere with it though as life happened, as it is wont to do. Other green beans that were Phaseolus vulgaris rather than Phaseolus coccinius managed perfectly well.

We're at a different place now, with better soil, and which hadn't been abandoned for so long. The beans just grow here fine, no problem at all.

The bean that most of the locals grow as a storage crop is feijão frade, which you might know as the black-eyed pea. They seem particularly good at coping with heat, drought, neglect and poor soil.

I'd recommend finding someone near to you who grows beans successfully and begging a shovel-full of soil from their bean-patch to mix into a slurry to inoculate your seed, just in case your soil doesn't have enough of the right bugs.