Chickpea Growing Calendar: What to Do at Each Stage

The shape of the chickpea year

Sowing to dry harvest takes roughly ninety to a hundred and twenty days depending on temperature, and green picking begins about three weeks before the dry harvest would. Within that span the crop passes through four clearly different phases, and each one asks for something different from you, mostly in the form of restraint.

The first four weeks are establishment, when the taproot drives down and the plant looks as though nothing is happening above ground. Weeks four to eight are vegetative growth, when the bush fills out and the nodules start fixing nitrogen. Flowering and pod set follow, running for two to three weeks with a great many small pale flowers that are easy to overlook. Then comes ripening, three to four weeks of dry-down that decides whether the crop is worth having.

The unusual feature of that timeline is that the last phase is the one you cannot control and cannot rescue. Everything else in chickpea growing is decided by where you place that dry-down in your calendar.

Counting backwards to set the sowing date

Chickpeas are the crop where the sowing date is an output rather than an input. Start by identifying the three to four consecutive weeks in your year that are most reliably dry and sunny, and treat those as fixed. Then count back a hundred days, and check that the soil at that point will be above 50F (10C). If it will not be, you have a choice between sowing later and accepting a wetter ripening, or growing the crop mainly for green picking.

In a Mediterranean-type climate this puts sowing at the start of the cool wet half of the year, with ripening in the dry early summer, which is how the crop is grown across its native range. In a climate with wet summers, chickpeas are better as a spring sowing ripening into a dry early autumn. In a short cool summer they are a green crop and the dried harvest is a bonus if the weather cooperates.

This is also why chickpeas suit some gardens and not others, and there is no shame in concluding after one season that your climate does not have a dry enough late season for the dried crop. That conclusion is worth reaching deliberately rather than by repeated disappointment.

1. Fix the dry window first Identify three to four consecutive weeks in your year that are dependably dry and breezy. Everything else in the plan hangs off them.
2. Count back a hundred days That is your target sowing date. Adjust a week or two either way for a hot or a cool climate.
3. Check the soil temperature on that date Two inches down, above 50F (10C) for three consecutive mornings. If it is colder, delay and accept a shorter dry-down.
4. Decide green or dry before you sow If the dry window is doubtful, plan the whole row for green picking. Green pods arrive three weeks earlier and no weather can take them from you.
5. Mark the ripening weeks in advance Write the expected dry-down dates down at sowing so that you are watching the forecast in the right fortnight rather than reacting late.

The decisions that actually come up

Four moments in the season call for a judgement rather than a routine task. The first is at week five or six, if the crop looks pale and stunted: pull one plant and look for pink inside the nodules before you consider feeding, because feeding a plant that is simply cold makes matters worse.

The second is at first flower, when you decide whether to water. Fold the test into a single rule: leaves still folded upward at dawn means one deep inch (25 mm), and anything less than that means leave it alone. The third is at first pod set, when you decide whether pod borer is present in enough numbers to act on, and acting is only effective before the caterpillars are inside the pods.

The fourth and most consequential comes during ripening, when rain is forecast and the crop is close but not quite finished. Pull it. Plants at eighty to ninety per cent brown pods finish drying perfectly well hung under cover, and a week of rain on a standing ripe crop splits seed coats, sprouts seed in the pod and can cost you the whole harvest.

Handle the crop in gloves and long sleeves at every stage, and only when the foliage is dry. The glandular hairs exude an acid that irritates skin, and wet foliage both carries that acid onto you and spreads blight spores down the row.

Clearing up and what follows the crop

Once the plants are threshed, the bed is free. Cut or pull the tops and remove them, but leave the roots in the ground where the nodules will release their fixed nitrogen as they decay. A leafy crop sown or planted straight into a cleared chickpea bed benefits noticeably, and that is the most reliable way to collect the second half of what this crop produces.

Compost clean haulm and bin anything that showed ascochyta lesions, since the fungus survives on debris for two to three years. Note the bed on your rotation plan: chickpeas should not return to it, or follow another legume in it, for three or four years.

The record that makes next year's calendar

Four dates and one weight are enough. Sowing date, first flower, first inflated pod, and the day you pulled the plants; then the dry weight of clean seed against the length of row it came from. Written together on one line, those numbers turn a vague sense that the season went well or badly into a plan you can act on.

Add one sentence about the weather during the ripening weeks. If it rained, say how many days early or late the crop was relative to the dry spell, because that number is precisely how far to move next year's sowing date. Over two seasons this crop becomes predictable in a way it never is from memory alone, and it is the only reliable way to find out whether your garden can grow it dry or only green.