Wisdom of Broad Beans

During this winter season, I planted two kinds of leguminous plants in the backyard: peas and broad beans. The peas bloomed two months ago, but there were no insects pollinating them. I was very doubtful whether they could produce pods. After reviewing the literature, I found that both peas and broad beans are self-pollinated, so there is no need to pay special attention to them. Soon after the pea flowers faded, I found newly grown pea pods, so I ate freshly picked snow peas many times.

Since broad beans bloom and grow more slowly than peas, after seeing broad beans blooming, I thought they would be like peas: i.e. when the flowers withered, there would be pods. I kept this belief for more than a month and went to the yard from time to time to observe the growth of broad beans. Unfortunately, under the conditions of repeated pollination by dozens of bees and insects, all the broad bean flowers faded and fell off, and there was no tendency to form pods. By applying sufficient water and fertilizer, I could see that my broad beans were growing well, yet there were no pods. I thought that it was probably because the season was wrong, and they only bloomed but did not bear fruit. Fortunately, the fresh broad bean tips are of good quality. We started picking them half a month ago. They were delicious after stir-frying and making into soups. Last week, I was still planning how to clean up the broad bean field after eating the bean tips. Suddenly, I discovered that young broad bean pods had appeared on the broad bean stems that were picked a week ago.

This discovery changed my original plan of clearing the broad bean field, because it would be more effective to pinch off all the broad bean tips. Plus in a few weeks’ time, we should be able to eat fresh broad beans as well.

It was great to observe these interesting outcomes after a few months of planting practice in the backyard. Leguminous plants indeed possess many secrets. I can’t help wondering if broad bean seedlings might not be inclined to form pods even when they have sufficient water and fertilizer.  However, when they face a survival crisis in the tip pinching experience, then they resort to producing pods as the only means to survive.

Through this accidental experiment and observation, maybe we can say that broad bean plants possess a survival mechanism by generating different information when their circumstances change. In our case, the information being transmitted from the tip to the main plant is obviously different before and after the tip was pinched. The spirituality of living creatures can reveal the wisdom of life everywhere.