Broad beans

I have found broad beans!

Well, actually, I have found broad beans, and I have also found seeds to *grow* broad beans!  The Big Bazaar got in some broad beans recently, which prompted me to start searching for the seeds.  Which I finally found.

Broad beans, also known as fava beans, are a seasonal rarity in the produce sections of grocery stores.  (Yes, yes, I know, "Fava beans and a nice Chianti."  I had a vague idea that "fava" beans might have been broad beans harvested when slightly younger or less mature, but fava just seems to be another name.  Younger beans can be eaten pods and all.)  In fact, in the major chains, you probably never see them at all.  (The seed packets that I found are labelled "heirloom" seeds.)  You generally only find broad beans once a year, if at all.  They are harder to find, in the stores, than raspberries.  Probably due to the rarity, they are expensive, and then, when you do get them, you seem to waste a lot of them, since you have to throw away what seems like three pounds of pods, just to get a half a cup of the beans, themselves.

Gloria loved broad beans.  Actually, I don't know if she liked eating them all that much.  (I have no idea whether or not I cooked them right.  In fact, I know I didn't cook them the best way.)  In an excess of caution, I tended to boil them for at least half an hour, based on a vague knowledge that *some* bean varieties, if you don't cook them enough, contain an astonishing quantity of toxins.  I suspect, but haven't confirmed, that more often people fry them in butter, but, due to the aforementioned concerns about toxins, I never experimented with that.  (I never knew about "double podding" until I did some research while writing this.)

What Gloria really loved about broad beans, I suspect, was that her grandfather grew them.  He always had a garden, wherever they lived, and broad beans were one of the things he grew.

So, I've found some seed packets for broad beans.  (I got them at Walmart.  I'm gaining a little [very little] respect for Walmart's range of seed varieties, in comparison to other non-specialty places where you can get seeds.)  I got a couple of packets.  Given the fact that Walmart is the *only* place I've found them, so far, I'm awfully tempted to get more and save them for future years, but that's not really how seeds work.  (I probably will give in and get a couple more packets to save for the future ...)  I'm definitely going to put some broad beans into at least two of the gardens this year, probably in with the corn.  The articles I've read say that they are easy to grow.  When the pods first form the bumps of seeds inside, they can be eaten, whole, raw.  When they get to be two or three inches, or six centimetres, long, they can be cooked and eaten like green beans.  When full grown, you can double pod the beans, and, since double-podding usually involves blanching, you can just eat the seeds after that.  And apparently the seeds are nice mashed, as a paste or spread.

OK, another grief burst.  I've never been any good as a gardener, and we couldn't do much in the townhouse anyway, but, apparently, broad beans can be grown in pots.  (As long as they are big pots.) So, the whole time we were married, I could have grown broad beans.  And we could have experimented with the various stages of them.  And I let Gloria down.  Yet again ...