Field Beans, about 3 feet tall

Just a quickie for today because I saw something in a shop in Richmond and thought “Ooh I’ll have some of that.”

Field beans, or Vicia Faba to give them their proper name, are an excellent green manure for winter planting, which will help break down heavy soils and leave beautifully friable soil in the spring.

What is green manure?
Well it’s a plant that acts like a manure for a patch of soil that, ideally, is going to be bare for a few weeks or more. At Daisy Cottages, and at The Field, we have several such spots.

The key thing about these plants is that they are ‘nitrogen fixers’. In simple terms, this means they suck nitrogen out of the air, this goes into the plants, (mostly the roots), and then when you cut the plants down and they rot, the nitrogen is ‘fixed’ in the soil for the next generation of plants to use as a nutrient.

Other benefits
If planted properly, green manures usually form a thick blanket of lovely green plants which block out the sunlight for anything else, thus preventing weeds to grow.

A good winter green manure will attract useful predators of slugs, such as beetles and frogs. They sit in the lovely cool damp conditions under the plants, and hopefully eat up all the nasty slugs and snails.

The important thing to remember with green manures is to cut them down before they flower. With beans like this, you also leave the roots in the ground to rot away.

Two weeks after you’ve cut them down, you can dig the ground over and plant your new crop.