Harvesting my First Black Chickpeas

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Black chickpea harvest time! #communitygarden #growyourown #sustainable

A post shared by Amie Watson (@misswattson) on Aug 12, 2020 at 8:59am PDT

Have you ever eaten chickpeas? Probably. Have you ever grown chickpeas, though? Unless you’re a farmer on the Prairies, probably not. And have you ever grown black chickpeas? Even if you are a Saskatchewan farmer like a number of my extended family members, you probably haven’t.

But I have. I basically just grew them because my favourite seed shop (Ferme Tournesol) had them and I knew legumes are nitrogen fixers, so good for the soil quality, and thought growing chickpeas would be cool.

I didn’t know that growing them would get me a lot of respectful nods from my Bangladeshi community garden neighbours. That was a bonus. No one asked me to marry their son this time, though, unlike at my last community garden. I think they assume I’m past my marrying prime now. But that’s an unfair stereotype. Maybe they just think I’m strange, trying to grow black chickpeas when not even they do it. It’s probably a lot cheaper and less work to just buy a bag, even of the black ones, aka Kabouli Black Chickpeas or Kala Chana.

But growing them was so cool. I saw the small pods develop and then harder slightly. I opened a few pods to see how they were coming along, and often they were still mini green seeds inside. Eventually, once they felt a little firmer in the pods, they got to the size of a standard chickpeas but were still green. So I wasn’t sure if they were ready to harvest. I picked a few and steamed like green beans and they were delicious, though.

Then this week I saw that some of the shells were becoming more translucent and could see some purple in the skin, so I opened them and they were black inside! The purple colour was the black colour as seen through the translucency.

So I made that video up above of opening them. I then did some research and that’s how the chickpeas look when they’re ready to be harvested to be dried. This website says to leave them in their pods and let them dry for a few days, which will crack them open on their own. I understand why it says that because opening them by hand, one by one, is time-consuming. Better to let nature do the work for you.

But it also said you can harvest the pods when the chicpeas inside are green, so I’d been doing it right from the start, and I’d better hurry up and harvest the green ones while they’re fresh, much like runner beans before they harden into rocks. (I do love my cranberry beans, which I kind of want to let harden and dry, so I can stare at their pink-veined loveliness into 2021.

But that just shows what a crazy gardening lady I’ve become.

I think the Bangladeshi women might be right.