Harvesting Chickpeas: Green Pods, Dry Seed and Why You Need Gloves

Be honest about the yield before you start

Chickpea pods are small and inflated, like miniature paper lanterns, and each one holds one or two seeds. That is the whole arithmetic of this crop. A well-grown plant carries somewhere between forty and a hundred pods, which comes out at roughly one to two ounces (30 to 60 g) of dry seed per plant. A ten-foot (3 m) row of about twenty plants therefore yields something in the region of one and a half to two and a half pounds (700 g to 1.1 kg) of dried chickpeas.

That is a few meals, not a year's supply, and it is worth knowing before you spend a season on it. What a garden row is genuinely good for is the green stage, which you cannot buy fresh in most places, and a jar of dried seed that tastes noticeably better than anything on the shelf.

It also improves the ground it grew in. The nitrogen fixed by the nodules stays in the soil when you leave the roots in place, and a leafy crop planted into a cleared chickpea bed does visibly well.

If your reason for growing chickpeas is quantity, sow the whole bed and plan to eat most of it green, where every pod counts as food weeks earlier and the weather cannot take it away from you.

The acid on the leaves, and how to handle the crop

Every green part of a chickpea plant is covered in glandular hairs that secrete a clear, sticky, strongly acidic exudate, mostly malic acid with some oxalic. It is acidic enough to sting cuts and grazes, to irritate the skin of anyone working bare-armed through a row for an hour, and to leave a tacky film on tools and clothing. In parts of the world it has historically been collected off the foliage and used as vinegar, which tells you the concentration is not trivial.

The working rules that follow from this are simple and not optional. Wear gloves and long sleeves for any job that means putting your hands into the plants. Harvest in dry conditions, in the afternoon once dew has gone, because water dissolves the exudate and spreads it over everything it runs onto, including your forearms. Wash your hands before touching your face, and rinse gloves and tools afterwards rather than leaving the film to set.

The same rule serves a second purpose. Blight spores travel on wet foliage and on the clothing of anyone who walks a wet row, so harvesting dry also stops you carrying disease down the bed.

Green chickpeas: the harvest most gardeners miss

Immature chickpeas eaten fresh are a genuinely good vegetable and almost nobody outside the crop's home range has tried them. The seed at this stage is bright green, sweet, faintly grassy, with a texture between a garden pea and a young broad bean, and it is eaten raw out of the pod, boiled for two or three minutes, or roasted in the pod over heat until the shell chars.

The window is short. Pick when the pod is fully inflated, still bright green with no yellowing at the tip, and the seed inside fills it and squeaks slightly when you press it. Ten days later the seed will have gone starchy and dull and the moment has passed for that pod. Because pods do not all mature together, a row gives you two to three weeks of green picking if you go over it every three or four days.

Take green pods from the lower and middle parts of the bush and leave the top ones to dry, or dedicate a few plants entirely to green picking. Every pod picked green is a pod that will not be in the dry harvest, so decide which you want rather than drifting between the two.

1. Test one pod before you pick a bowlful Open a fully inflated pod. Bright green, plump, sweet raw means pick now. Pale, floury or hard means that part of the row has already gone past green.
2. Snip, do not pull Chickpea stems are brittle and a pulled pod tears the branch. Use snips or hold the stem with the other hand, gloved, and twist the pod off.
3. Work over the row every three or four days Pods mature in waves from the bottom of the bush upward. Frequent passes extend green picking to two or three weeks instead of one.
4. Eat or refrigerate the same day Green chickpeas convert sugar to starch fast once picked, exactly as sweetcorn does. Shell and use within a day or refrigerate in the pod.

Bringing in the dry crop

The dry harvest is a single event, not a series of pickings. You are waiting for the whole plant to senesce: leaves yellow and drop, stems turn straw-colored, and pods go from green through tan to a papery brown. When about eighty to ninety per cent of the pods are brown and the seeds rattle loose inside them, the crop is ready. Seed at that point is hard enough that you cannot dent it with a thumbnail.

This is where rain does its damage. A wet spell during the ripening weeks swells the dry seed, splits the coats, sprouts seed inside the pod and lets pod rots take hold, and a crop that was three days from harvest can be worthless after a week of it. If rain is forecast and the plants are close, pull them early rather than gambling: seed at ninety per cent maturity finishes drying perfectly well under cover, whereas rained-on seed does not recover.

Harvest by cutting or pulling whole plants rather than picking pods individually. Shake the soil off the roots and hang them under cover with air moving around them for one to two weeks, until the stems snap rather than bend.

Threshing, drying properly and storing

Threshing a garden quantity needs no equipment. Put the dry plants in a clean pillowcase or a large tub, beat or tread them, and most pods will burst. Tip the mixture from one container to another in a breeze, or in front of a fan, and the chaff blows away while the seed falls. Two passes usually give clean seed.

Do not store immediately. Spread the threshed seed one layer deep on a tray somewhere dry and airy for another week, then test it: a properly dry chickpea shatters rather than squashes when hit with a hammer, and cannot be marked with a fingernail. Seed stored damp will mold or ferment inside the jar within a month, and there is no saving it.

Store in sealed glass jars somewhere cool and dark, where the seed keeps for a year or more and cooks after an overnight soak. Set aside the largest, cleanest seed from your healthiest plants as next year's sowing seed. Chickpeas are self-pollinating, so saved seed comes true, which makes this one of the few crops where saving your own is straightforwardly worth doing. Clear the spent plants once threshed, but leave the roots in the soil to release their fixed nitrogen as they break down.

What to record at harvest

Weigh the dry seed and write the number down against the row length. That single figure is what tells you, honestly and permanently, how much space this crop needs to be worth growing in your garden, and it is the number most people guess wrong until they measure it once.

Record the date you started green picking, the date you pulled the plants, and above all the weather during the three ripening weeks. If rain spoiled the crop, note by how many days you missed the dry window, because that is exactly how far you should move next year's sowing.