edamame soybeans

Sep 15, 2012 1 Replies

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this past spring there was a question if edamame soybeans were as productive as regular soybeans.

i'd not grown edamame soybeans here before so i could not say for sure. now after the season is getting close to being finished i can at least report some of the results.

we had a pretty good bout of rain and floods right when the soybeans were first flowering. many of those pods shrivelled up and fell off. we also had another severe rain storm that interrupted flowering again. still there is a nice crop of pods on the plants. not exactly comparable to previous soybean years for me, but i think the plants would have a comparable yield if we had a more normal season.

the plantings were in four patches. two of the patches are sandy soil with gravel underneath (excellent drainage). the other two patches were clay or heavy soil (poor drainage). in all cases they grew well enough to produce. the smallest plants are in the spot where the soil is compacted the most and the lowest area that flooded.

so all told, after this kind of a challenging season this is a crop that is about as bullet proof as i can ask for. and the nice thing is that Ma likes them too.

i'll be interested to see how they finish up.

songbird

...

still drying the latest round of edamame soybeans for seed, but the greenies are done for the season. a hard frost two nights ago finished off the plants.

from a 2oz package of seeds (about 70 seeds i think it was) we had one batch of greenies several weeks ago and then yesterday i picked what were left of them all. the green ones i sorted out and then weighed them at 3lbs, boiled them and then shelled them out for 21oz of edible results.

the dry ones will be a while yet before i shell those and weigh them out, but i do have

7oz already shelled and dried from a few weeks ago.

the boiled green shells are already making some worms very happy. it's not often they get cooked greens.

the plants i pulled up to inspect the roots for nitrogen forming nodules were all loaded so as i suspected we have a good population of those bacteria in the soil here. some roots went down a good 18 inches for the larger plants in sandy soil. the smaller plants in clay barely made it down 4 inches. funny to see a tiny plant of 12 inches loaded with enough pods that you can't see the stem.

the habit of the plants in growth was about the same as any of the previous soybean crops i've grown with one difference. the pods on these can get heavy enough to collapse and break branches from the plant.

songbird

edamame soybeans

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