As a child, I spent most days outside with my hands in the dirt. When I wasn’t reading, I was gardening, which seems incongruous now because I live in an apartment building and my idea of keeping plants alive extends only to those in pots. And even then, I struggle. But as a kid, I watched my parents commit to regenerating their quarter-acre block with plants native to the area, slowly encircling our house in bush. And with the growth of the gum trees and the bottlebrush and the wattle came the echidnas, the blue-tongue lizards and the birds. So many birds.
And while I loved having my hands in the dirt, I wasn’t interested in growing trees. I wanted to crowd the earth with vegetables and flowers that I could look after. With my dad’s help, we converted a strip of paving at the sunny end of the house, removing the bricks and covering the ground with rich, dark soil. I planted pansies and daises, sweet peas, broad beans, carrots and beetroot, staking those that needed somewhere to climb and tying up their fragile stems with strips of nylon stockings.
And then I waited. All through autumn and winter, I waited. Soon green shoots appeared, and small white flowers marking the space where pods of peas and beans would grow. The tufts of carrots pushed up through the earth, and slowly my garden transformed. Some of the vegetables that I grew I didn’t like much. Beetroot was always lost on me because it tasted of dirt. And carrots were fine but never my favourite. My fingers grew nimble podding peas, but I could never eat enough to be satisfied.
But the first time that I tasted broad or fava beans, I was hooked. Not the frozen, mushy, grey-skinned disasters you buy in the supermarket, but the tender, sweet baby pods that only need one shelling.
Growing these beans required patience, and I never had any as a child. I would want to pull them off too soon before the bean had a chance to fully grow, so I had to learn how to wait until they were just right. I remember Mum explaining that the first crop of beans picked would taste very different from the last. She was right. The first beans were always eaten raw, sometimes without even shelling them. But the later crops needed double peeling, and they would be crushed to make fresh felafels for dinner. Mum would cook the hard outer skins in a stew, not wanting to waste a bite. Each year, I’d mourn as the season grew to an end and the beans lost their vibrant green and began tasting woody.
That garden taught me about the seasons. About when to eat raw corn from the cob, when it was time for the tomato plants to go into the ground and of the joy of kneeling in the dirt to find a fennel bulb buried deep. It taught me that fava bean season is short, and to eat as many as I can in the first few weeks of spring, before they fatten and harden and need more preparation to eat. When I left my vegetable patch behind for a share house in the city, Mum and I would meet at the Queen Vic market and wander the aisles like hard-worn desire lines, stopping at the same handful of stalls we visited each week. When spring arrived, she would surprise me with a paper bag stuffed with the first fava beans of the season, and we’d pod them as we shopped, eating them raw.
When Mum died she took with her so many recipes and tastes that I was desperate to recreate. Her lasagne always oozed in a way that mine did not. She was a fearless cook, inventing things from scratch, rarely writing down instructions, but just working with whatever was on hand. I couldn’t make her zabaglione ice-cream or her hand-rolled kibbeh, so instead I began hunting out the taste of my childhood in the vegetables that I grew.
And broad beans were the quickest way back. They became one of my daughter’s favourites too. She used to take them to school in her lunchbox for a snack. As she grew older, I would start making broad-bean dip and bright green felafels, just like Mum used to make. They never taste exactly the same, but they are close enough to remind me of my gardening days.
This year my daughter left home. And as spring rolled around, I found myself at the market, filling two paper bags with broad beans. One for me. And one for her.
• Nova Weetman is an award-winning children’s author. Her memoir, Love, Death & Other Scenes, is published by UQP
