Picking Broad Beans: Whole Pods, Shelling Size and Storing

Two harvests, one plant

Broad beans are picked at two quite different stages, and most disappointment with this crop comes from picking at the wrong one. Very young pods, two to four inches (5 to 10 cm) long with no bean shapes visible through the wall, are cooked and eaten whole like a flat green bean. They are sweet, tender and completely different from what most people expect from this crop, and they are only available for about a week per truss.

Mature pods, six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm) long with the beans clearly bulging through the wall, are shelled and the beans cooked. This is the classic harvest. Pick these when the pods are plump and still glossy green, and the scar at the point where the bean attaches inside the pod is still white or pale green.

That scar is the single best indicator on the whole plant. Split one pod and look at it. White means tender and sweet. Turning gray or black means the bean has gone starchy and tough-skinned, and from that point you are into the third use for this crop, which is drying.

Pods fill from the bottom of the plant upward, so the lowest truss is always ready first. Pick from the bottom and work up, and check the lowest pods a week before you think they will be ready.

How to pick without damaging the plant

Broad bean pods hold on firmly and the stems are brittle. Pulling a pod off one-handed tears the truss, and often snaps the whole stem, which costs you every pod above it. Hold the stem with one hand and take the pod off with the other, twisting it downward until it parts, or cut it with snips if the plant is dry and brittle.

Pick every two or three days once the crop starts. Leaving mature pods on the plant tells it the job is done and slows the filling of everything above, so regular picking genuinely extends the harvest. A row that is picked over properly cropped for four to six weeks; the same row picked once a week gives you a shorter, coarser harvest.

The whole crop from one sowing runs for roughly three to four weeks of prime picking. Autumn-sown rows start earliest, spring-sown rows follow, and if you have both you get a continuous run rather than a glut.

1. Start with the lowest truss Feel along the pods on the bottom two or three trusses. Prime pods feel firm and lumpy along their length. Flat, floppy pods higher up are not ready yet.
2. Split one pod before you commit Open a representative pod and look at the attachment scar. White scar means pick the whole truss. Still-tiny beans mean give it three or four more days.
3. Two hands on every pod Support the stem, twist the pod downward and away. Never yank. A snapped stem loses you every pod above the break.
4. Come back every two or three days Pods go from prime to starchy in under a week in warm weather. Frequent picking also keeps the plant filling the upper trusses.
5. Shell the same day Beans left in the pod on the kitchen counter carry on converting sugar to starch. Shell within a few hours of picking and refrigerate or cook.

Skins, over-mature beans and drying

As beans mature the skin around each bean toughens from tender to leathery. Small young beans are eaten skin and all. Larger ones are better double-podded: cook the shelled beans for a minute or two, drop them into cold water, and squeeze each one out of its skin. It is tedious, it takes about ten minutes for a colander of beans, and it turns a mediocre harvest into a very good one. If you find yourself doing it every time, you are picking too late.

Beans that have gone right past useful eating size are not wasted. Leave those pods on the plant until they blacken and dry, then shell out the beans and dry them fully indoors on a tray for a week or two. Dried broad beans store for a year in a jar and cook like any dried bean after an overnight soak.

Save your best dried beans for seed if the crop grew well. Take them from the lowest, largest pods on the healthiest plants, dry them hard, and store them somewhere cool and dark. Broad beans cross-pollinate readily with other beans flowering nearby, so seed saved from a single variety in a garden with other beans will not come exactly true, but it will still crop.

After the last picking

When the top trusses are picked, the plant is finished. It will not produce a second flush no matter how long you leave it, and a standing finished row is a reservoir of aphids and chocolate spot spores sitting next to whatever you plant next.

Cut the tops off at ground level and compost them if they are clean, or bin them if chocolate spot or rust was bad. Leave the roots in the soil undisturbed. The nodules on them hold fixed nitrogen that releases as they break down, which is why a leafy crop planted straight into a cleared bean bed does noticeably well.

Clearing promptly also frees the ground early enough for a second crop in the same season, which is one of the underrated advantages of an autumn-sown row that finishes in early summer.

What to record at harvest

Write down the date of the first picking and the date of the last, for each sowing separately. That pair of dates is the most useful thing you will learn all season: it tells you exactly how many weeks earlier your autumn row cropped, and whether the two sowings joined up into a continuous supply or left a gap you should close next year.

Note roughly how much you picked, in whatever unit suits you, and whether you found yourself skinning beans regularly. Consistent skinning means picking later than ideal, and shifting your picking rhythm from weekly to every three days fixes it without changing anything else about how you grow the crop.