Ojito Haba

Ojito Haba is a northern New Mexico landrace fava that Native Seeds/SEARCH collected in 1994 from a farmer at Ojito, a settlement just south of the Spanish village of Chamisal, in country sitting around 7,500 feet. It has never been through a breeding program; it survives in the NS/S Seed Bank Collection as a farmer-maintained population, so expect the seed lot to carry more variation than a catalog hybrid would. Its calling card is seed size and color: bicolored green-and-tan beans running up to about three quarters of an inch long, far heftier than the small brown favas usually sold as cover-crop seed. The collectors also recorded how the source family ate them, soaking fresh favas for three days with a daily water change, then slipping each bean out of its skin and deep frying it. NS/S reports the accession performing well in recent grow-outs, and offers it in small conservation-scale packets rather than bulk.