Pulses

Professor Colin Leakey was a true pioneer of beans and other food crops. This article, The Nine Lives of Colin Leakey, was first published in Pulse magazine in 2017 and surveys the many aspects of his extraordinary life.

It's wonderful to see Professor Martin Wolfe's pioneering work on agroforestry reported in the The Guardian & reaching a wider audience. Martin is a long-time friend and mentor to Hodmedod, and grows naked barley, lentils, wheat and more for us. His whole farm system approach and drive for diversity at every level are an inspiration to us

Hodmedod won two awards at the 2017 Good Choice! Quality Food Awards. Our Yellow Pea Flour and Roasted Green Peas with Horseradish were both category winners, while our Lightly Salted Roasted Fava Beans were highly commended.

How do you eat your peas? Whole or soft? Parched or mushy? Black or green? Carlin or marrowfat? (We’re talking proper dried peas here, not those Johnny-come-lately immature fresh “garden pea” imposters*.)

After three years of research and crop trials we started harvesting the first commercial crop of British-grown lentils at the end of August. Over the next few weeks six farms in Suffolk, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Hertfordshire and Sussex will harvest a range of organic and non-organic lentils.

We’re over the moon to be one of three finalists for the Best Producer category of the 2017 BBC Food and Farming Awards. It’s a testament to the many wonderful farmers and producers we work with – and to the potential of British farming to produce an ever wider variety of foods.

BBC Radio 4's Food Programme investigates pulses from Britain and further afield to mark the UN International Year of Pulses. Hodmedod's Nick Saltmarsh joined Sheila Dillon, Jenny Chandler and Sanjay Kumar in discussion at the BBC's Bristol studios.

Three of Hodmedod's British-grown pulse and grain products are among the 2016 Great Taste awards winners! We're delighted that the quality and taste of our Yellow Pea Flour, canned Carlin Peas and British Quinoa have been recognised in these acclaimed awards, widely considered as the benchmark for fine food and drink in the UK.

We were very excited to discover Abyssinian peas in the John Innes Centre's seed bank and are now running garden trials to find out more about these unusual and beautiful peas from Ethiopia.

If you are following a gluten-free diet it's not always easy to buy British ingredients with clear provenance. Hodmedod has now launched a range of gluten-free flours, all milled in Essex from pulses and quinoa grown on British farms.

Hodmedod's Organic Carlin Peas have been awarded the prestigious Soil Association BOOM award for best pantry product. We're overjoyed that these wonderful but little-know traditional British peas have been recognised for their deliciously nutty flavour.