Will
Justin@scandigonian
@adam any input on this?
Adam@justin @scandigonian Favas are my personal favorite legume for the westside; they're tall, compete well with weeds, can be planted in fall as a dual cover crop/legume crop. (their winter limit is ~15F/-9C, but varies by variety). The leaves are great for salad. Seeds can be harvested green as a veggie, or left to mature for dry beans.
The large beans mean they are easy to harvest; you can thresh a lot of beans quickly. Tons of flowers for the bees. The beans make great hummus too. (3/3)
@scandigonian As luck would have it, it looks like I took a picture of the lentils!. I was off at grad school and so this was at my folks place in the Chehalis Valley. So they admittedly didn't get much weeding at all. They kind of look like sweet peas or vetch. Think I got the variety from WSU's Foundation Seed Program.
If I recall right, I came back to a giant patch of smartweed. But a lot of my other tests pulled through great (bread wheat, pasta/durum wheat, oca, mashua, hulless oats)
SolaršGarden@scandigonian @adam - they look a bit like chick-peas, another shoppy-cheapy, that I've grown for fun/experiment tho. I bundled the whole dry plants in sacks, and hung them, rattled them a bit, and many of the seeds fell to the bottom. The rest of the bag got strewn whole for new crop. Maybe this would work with lentils too? But separating the bits and pieces from the small lentils seems like a challenge.
@justin @scandigonian Since I mentioned favas, I am obligated to mention the wonderful "Fava Bean Cookbook", a publicly supported cookbook from SARE and California State University: https://projects.sare.org/media/pdf/F/a/v/Fava-Bean-Recipe-Book.pdf
I sprout lentils in 500 g batches on an almost continuous basis, as a staple food here: super-easy and fast to germinate and deal with as a food, but I've never wanted to try them as a crop, bcs of weed control and harvesting. Assumed some kind of mechanical processing would be essential for useful #growYourOwn quantities, which I just haven't got time for, esp as good quality commercial grown are so cheap.
Favas, OTOH, I grow everywhere, from improving poor soil areas (any crop yield incidental) to premium food. Compare - dry commercial lentils 2.30ā¬/kg, yielding well over 2 kg sprouted :cf: fresh favas in pods 3ā¬/kg, bean yield 0.3-0.4 kg... frozen commercial are better value but not as nice as own, which I freeze too.
this last winter, the conveyer-belt of named storms and non-stop rain injured then rotted a large proportion of my over-winterers, with temperatures well above freezing... but still enough coming back for a good crop, and pods presently 10-20cm
This is helpful information. Thank you for posting it!