Rod Craddock wrote:
"The Reid" wrote in message
...
I plant broad beans at the end of November, It worked fine last
year. This year some renegade beans came up from missed pods, I
left them in to see what would happen (they were flowering last
week). They now appear to have been killed by the frost.
Now, although there seems to be varieties recommended for
November planting, all the seed packets seem to say plant in
early winter if you want to. So its not variety. Was it because
the flowering part of the plant is more delicate? Or do the
winter planting come up more frost hardened?
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" -- you can email
us@
this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" -- dontuse@
all, it's a spamtrap

This has been my experience for many years now. I don't have a good
explanation but newly germinated beans do seem to be quite frost
proof
while more mature plants are damaged. Ours were sown last week and
I
don't expect to see much of them before Christmas.

Broad beans are several of a large number of cultivars of _Vicia
faba_. The varieties include the old "horse bean" and "field bean" as
well as the Middle Eastern "ful", and they all have quite sharply
different progeny -- the seeds of "ful", for example, have a much
thinner skin than those of our "field bean", which is why they're
more palatable to humans. The Middle-Eastern varieties do seem to
grow well in British conditions.

My understanding is that it's an annual species, so that should mean
that your "volunteers" really are dead, since they've been cut down
by frost after an autumn flowering. But this would not be the first
time a species treated in cultivation as an annual was actually
perennial: we grow plants to suit ourselves, not their genes. I'd
leave the row alone till late spring to see what happens: you could
end up with extremely vigorous early plants giving a correspondingly
early crop (maybe even multi-stemmed) because of a well-developed
root system, or the weak crop we might expect from a short-lived
perennial, or you could end up with nothing at all. If shoots appear
in the spring, give 'em a good feed. It's a valuable experiment, if
you have the space. (Don't forget which variety you sowed!)

--
Mike.