Edamame soy beans are a large-seeded cultivar bred for the green beans. They are a rewarding crop, and another one that I had no experience of growing. In Sydney I usually had a bag of frozen edamame in the apartment freezer, ready for snacks, and had wondered how they compared with fresh ones.
How do they compare? Fresher, greener, and I know how they’ve been treated.
If you’re unfamiliar with edamame, they are soy bean pods picked green, and often eaten as an appetizer.
You boil them in salty water for 5 minutes, and eat them by squeezing them out of the pods between your teeth. They are delicious and high in protein.
I got the seeds from Green Harvest, a local supplier, and they come with a little sachet of inoculant, which is great. The inoculant is the strain of nitrogen-fixing symbiotic bacteria that invade the soy bean roots to form nodules which supply the beans with nitrogen, and fresh soil doesn’t necessarily have the right bacteria, so supplying the inoculant is thorough. The plants have certainly grown well, so I suppose it’s all working. By the way, the supplier warned that the seeds get fragile, and they’re right. You mix the inoculant with lime and a little water to coat the seeds before sowing, but the seed coat loosens very quickly and it’s easy to pull the two halves of the bean apart as you plant them. I lost a few this way, so learned to make the slurry at the last moment.
As for timing, I sowed two lots. The first September sowing struggled with dry weather but nevertheless supplied a good crop. The second late October sowing at the Mid-levels has done better, and is loaded with fat beans. Our Agriculture Department recommends sowing late (till January) for grain soy, and I can see why, although for home vegetables I will still stagger the sowings through summer for a long picking season. The plants bear very heavily but you can pick them as you need them and there is no rush to get them off the bushes.