@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)

@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)

@justin @scandigonian My friend was able to grow chickpeas in Olympia. I think it’s possible to grow them and lentils here – you just have to be on it with weeding.

Since they are so close to the ground, they also might be a bit harder to harvest than, say, wheat, which is something you can easily cut with a hand scythe or rice knife. The pods are throughout the plants, so you have to beat the entire bushes rather than with wheat, where the spikelets are easier to thresh (2/3).

@justin @scandigonian I tried growing them once south of Olympia. They did well at the beginning, but the thing about lentils (and other pulses like chickpeas) is they grow low to the ground and compete poorly with weeds. I don't recall harvesting any lentils, so I think they just got swallowed by the weeds.

Chickpeas are the same way. I think we just have ample soil moisture for tall weeds to outcompete them here. That's very different than in the Columbia Basin. (1/3)