Derry Girls, AKA Londonderry Broad Bean

The Londonderry Broad bean / Derry Girls came to us from the Irish Seed Saver’s collections. They found them in the British Heritage Seed library.

We assume the seed collectors from said library collected the bean somewhere in County Londonderry and wrote down the county as its name. This is very common practice with seeds in seed collections. Hence, we don’t know what they called the beans or how long they had been in use.

We do know that they must be an interesting, hardy variety to be popular in one of the most northern counties.

We grew this bean to help keep it going and to keep the traits this localised landrace variety potentially has. We found it to be an enjoyable bean to grow and eat which is why we probably will continue to grow it every second year or so.

We took to affectionately calling it the Derry Girls after the fantastic TV show with the same name (NI’s answer to Father Ted).

If someone knows more about the history of the variety or how long it’s been in use, we would love to know about it.