Fava Bean (Vicia faba)

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Vicia faba - Wikipedia
Vicia faba - USDA PLANTS Database

Duration: Annual

Native to: Mediterranean area

Edibility: Fruit, leaves

Status in Yard: Garden, removed

I planted fava beans for the first time in November of 2016. They are large beans, and the general practice is to sow them 4 inches deep, which I did. They grew fairly well. Most of them survived the freeze on January 6-7, 2017, but they spent a couple days lying on their sides afterward. After the freeze, they grew more slowly, flowered late compared to other bean plants I had grown, and produced beans somewhat slowly after flowering.

I had two very small harvests of this bean in 2017, and I sauteed the beans both times. Unlike most beans, the individual beans have a sort of sheaths around them, which must be removed one-by-one before cooking the beans.

Some of the planted fava beans on January 1, 2017

Click the photo to enlarge it

The plants were still small and with only a few flowers on March 7, 2017, long after the snow peas and sugar snap peas I was growing had been producing well for a while.

The next week, the plants suddenly started growing faster and produced a lot of flowers. This photo is from March 13, 2017.


On March 23, I pulled a few fava bean plants out of the ground in the 1st bed (Plot 2). All the plants were flowering, but they weren't producing beans.
I cut all of the fava bean plants to their roots in Plot 3 because they really didn't belong there in the first place, I needed to make room for the next crop, and I was hedging my bet on the fava bean plants because I was thinking they might never produce beans. Once I removed those plants, I sowed bush beans "Contender" and "Roma 2", both varieties of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), among the remaining fava plants, using all of the beans in both seed packets.
By April 18, 2017, some of the remaining fava plants had started to produce bean pods, but they were also getting spots on their leaves. The favas are in the upper right of the photo below.

By April 27, 2017, all the fava bean plants had been removed.