In late September, I posted an article detailing my not-so-sparkling gardening experiences here. My woes.
In an effort to learn more, I read a bunch of books. Hoping that advice from the masters might somehow take hold in my rocky, acidic soil, I planted fava beans to overwinter. The idea, as I wrote in the aforementioned post:
Colleen gave me a bunch of fava bean seeds in order to plant a green manure crop and resurrect my soil. I watched a lot of YouTube videos on how favas pull up the nutrients down under the soil and then, if you cut them before they flower and either work the stalks in the dirt or lay them right on top of the garden, they decompose and give their nutrients back to the top layers of soil. They also protect the surface of the garden as a living mulch, and then as a cut mulch.
Well here they are. In a garden that has barely grown a thing, the favas are flourishing. They’ve looked like this for months. It hasn’t gotten cold enough to kill them off, either. So far.
I’m waiting for flower buds to form, my signal to cut them down and cover the soil with them. Until then, so far so good.
Just thought I’d put this out there in case you, too, need some horticultural encouragement from a novice but hopeful gardener.
