How to grow fava beans

Fava bean is a cool-season legume that stands apart from other garden beans by growing as a stout, upright plant, two to seven feet tall, on sturdy stalks with no trellis needed. Gardeners grow it both for the beans, shelled fresh from thick, glossy pods, and for what it does for the soil, since like other legumes it fixes nitrogen as it grows. It fills a slot most warm-season vegetables cannot: sown while the ground is still cold, it grows through the coolest months and finishes before summer heat arrives.

The hardest part of growing fava beans well is protecting the flowering stage from heat. The UC Small Farms Network notes the plant tolerates frost to the low twenties but struggles once heat arrives during flowering and pod development. A second-year gardener who treats fava bean like other beans and delays planting until after the last frost pushes flowering into the first hot stretch of summer instead of the mild weeks of spring. The flowers abort under the heat before setting pods, and a stalk that looked full all spring yields only a scattering of beans, its growth spent on foliage that never became food.