Our broad bean plants have been looking almost ready for a while, and today was the day to harvest them! First of all though, we collected the eggs from the chickens and ducks up in the farmyard. We found 5 chicken eggs and 2 duck eggs, which we added to the eggs that were collected yesterday.

Next, it was time to harvest our veg. Our broad bean plants had quite a lot of aphids on them, but because we had sown the beans before the winter, they were strong enough to produce good beans despite them. It also meant that we got to see some ladybirds, as they like to eat aphids!

Once we had harvested all the pods we could find, we went to the mint patch to harvest some fresh mint! It smelled lovely. Mint goes really well with broad beans, so we were excited to see what we could make with our freshly harvested ingredients.

Once we had harvested everything, we went back to the kitchen garden and washed our hands before we started preparing the food. We then took the broad beans out of their pods. It was like finding treasure every time! We noticed that the inside of the pods felt fuzzy and a bit slimy.

Once we had podded the beans, we added them to a pan of boiling water for just a couple of minutes, then into a bowl of cold water. This made it easy to pop them out of their individual shells, and gave them a lovely soft texture. We chopped some garlic, and the mint, and zested and juiced a lemon. We made sure to be careful using the knives and grater, so we wouldn’t hurt ourselves.

We mixed the lemon zest, mint, garlic and beans, then crumbled some feta cheese into the bowl with it. Then we added olive oil, salt and pepper to the lemon juice, to act as a dressing for our dish. We also toasted some bread on a pan on the hob, to go with our broad beans.

We added some of the dressing to the broad bean mixture, and then everything was ready to eat! We were excited to try our dish, which none of us had ever had before!

The result? A resounding success! One of our volunteers had 3 helpings of the broad bean salad on toast! We thought this dish tasted especially good as we had grown and harvested the ingredients ourselves, and everything was so fresh! We all said we would like to try and make it at home.