Favas germinate fast ie a couple of days in warmth. They then grow fast if they’re in warm conditions. You need to plant them out at a few inches tall so that would only be a couple of weeks if you start them inside. Of course they’ll need to be hardened off first. Did the grocery beans germinate? We grow a lot over here but there are many garden cultivars to choose from so I’ve always used those. We eat the fresh beans young and green. I’ve tried the leaves but not been excited by them.

@floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK Thank you so much for noticing this lonely thread. Seems like favas are not a big thing here. I got interested in growing them after watching some YT videos from the UK.

Indeed, my grocery shop dry favas germinated very nicely! I got two different packages which had different looking beans:

I soaked the ones on the right for some hours and then planted 10 of them and 8 germinated in 5 days. On day 7:

I am germinating a few more to get them ready to plant outside.

Only a few named varieties are available commercially here :( But since this is a first experiment I am quite happy with what I have.

I have never had fresh favas, having to peel each individual bean sounds daunting. Lets see how the baby leaves do for me😊

If you pick the beans young you do not need to peel them. I’ve grown and eaten them for years and never peeled a single one.

in California, I grew favas as a green manure crop - but never to maturity. There were farm fields there that grew favas over the winter, and they were beautiful in bloom. I noticed a lot of aphids though, so something to watch for.

Here, because my Spring tends to be short & warms quickly, I have not yet tried growing them. I'll be trialing two varieties this year (Black Russian & Crimson Flowered) basically to see if they will tolerate my climate. I will be both watching this thread, and posting my own results.

@floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK lets see how it goes, I might get some young beans 😁🤞. If I am encouraged I might look for a very early fruiting variety or a very winter hardy one so that I can plant it in fall and the plants may have enough time next spring to fruit.

@zeedman Zone 5 Wisconsin 👍

Seemingly overnight I see some blackening of tissue on the leaves of the very young fava plants. Does not look like spots on the surface, but a damage that makes the whole tissue black. What could this be? It cant be too little water or too cold. I am afraid to ask.

Here it is on the edges of some leave:

and beginning at some tips:

Here is a seeding that I know was healthy but turned all black. I pulled it out to check the roots, those looked OK.

So what can this be?

I have never had that but I would suspect a fungal problem caused by excess moisture in the mix and atmosphere. As with your peppers I see green algae on the surface. There is also evidence of root rot (the brown bits). Favas do have natural black markings at the leaf joints but that's not what this is.

@floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK The black necrosis did not progress any further and the seedlings are growing well now. I am mindful to water less.

When you remove the soft tips of the plants for food does this encourage the growth of side shoots lower down the plant or does it promote flowering and fruiting at the lower nodes?

Yes, removing the tops produces a little branching but not, ime, enough to make much difference to the yield. Flowering proceeds up the stem and won’t go back down again. Removing the tops will not produce more flowers from the main stem but you might get a few from side shoots. You might also get new shoots from the base. Since you are growing grocery store favas they may behave differently from the named cultivars I grow. I imagine they would be much taller for a start.

Fava field I walked past yesterday.

Floral: it looks so much warmer where you are. We are having ice storms for the past two days. The branches of my trees are encased in ice.

It’s in the 40s low 50s here at the moment. Chilly at night in high 30s. No snow at all this winter so far and very few nights dropping below freezing. The above field will have been sown in October. Very glad we don’t get ice storms. They sound horrible.

So I did give it a earnest go to grow a few fava plants. I wanted to taste the flowers and the greens: I knew I would never get to the beans. My climate would not work.

I germinated the supermarket beans, which was not too hard, and planted a good few out about the third week of March. The weather was not freezing every single night at the time. The little plants were 3 to 4 inches high and I thought I had a good edge on the season. Within a few days we had a hard freeze with temperatures in the teens for two days. The favas died. I did cover them with frost cloth but that was not sufficient to save them. Who knows how cold hardy these specific beans were? Maybe they were not hardy at all.

About a week/10 days later I could see a few coming back from the ground. This is what they looked like about 3 weeks later (after I saw sprouts coming). You can see the black remains of the frozen stem.

This is what they look like now.

The freeze set them back so much. They didn't get much chance to grow. I have to pull these out to grow other stuff there. Its getting too hot for them anyway.

When @zeedman Zone 5 Wisconsin was describing a climate with a short spring I didn't understand what that really meant, now I do.

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I did grow some of the same favas thickly in a couple of pots, indoors and then later outside. Not like microgreens but for shoots. These grew very well and was a success for me. Periodically I trimmed off the growing tips and they grew back nicely. Fertilized with leafy houseplant food after every cutting. I have cut tips 8 times with no problems, no deterioration in taste/flavor. And they reduce down as much as many greens so there was plenty. Those pots look like this now and I am done with them.

All of us loved the fava greens and flowers sauteed in butter and a little garlic until tender. The flavor is very 'green' in the best way. Kinda like pea shoots. Raw, they were awful. These were not hard to grow but very inconvenient in my circumstances. If I ever get to know about named varieties which would be good for my region then I will try again. I am happy with what I learned.

Thank you guys!

Thanks for the update. Very interesting. It is possible, I suppose, that your grocery store favas were grown in a warmer climate than yours. Even here we have some varieties which are hardier than others and which are recommended for overwintering. We have long springs with suitable temperatures for favas lasting months. I could even sow some now if I wanted to. Mine are about two feet tall now and setting pods. The crop on the warmer allotment plot which I pictured above have been producing for a couple of weeks.

I’ve just set out my runner beans, another stalwart of the British vegetable garden, with many named varieties, which I believe can be tricky in many US climates.