No Chianti jokes, please
Continuing the fava bean coverage, yesterday, I led a Village Harvest group that collected 430 lbs. This is definitely a new direction for Village Harvest. I joined the intrepid Mountain View crew, led by wonderful Karen, that meets every other Sunday at the Mountain View Community Services Agency, and brings the harvest back there. I was supposed to have a bunch of Stanford students, but only three showed up. The regular MV crew, however, was out in force, and seven of them decided to take a break from citrus to help out.
The favas were grown by a longtime Los Altos Hills resident
He’s planted 1/3 acre of fava beans for the last 10 of his now 86 years, and donated them to the food bank. Last year, he and his wife spent 5 days harvesting them; health issues led him to call on Village Harvest this year.
It's not just charity that makes him plant these. Like other legumes, fava beans have nitrogen-fixing nodules on their roots, so planting them improves the soil.
We cleaned out the front section in pretty short order,
then spent some time in the garage stripping the pods from the stalks.
It takes a lot of plants to fill up a crate’s worth of pods.
In the end, we got about 3/4 of the plants harvested, which came to 430 lbs. The rest won’t wait; another team is going on on Mother’s Day to finish the job. I hope he calls back next year!