Growing soya beans for edamame pods

Has anyone grown soya beans for edamame pods? Any recommended varieties? They’re one of my favourite snacks and should be good for fixing nitrogen.

i don’t have much experience with them. in your part of the world, i’d go with recommendations from johnny’s seeds in maine. i just took a quick glance and it looked like they had 3 varieties on offer, one of them organic, all of them open-pollinated.

Thanks Greg - I’ll check out that site.

the soybeans are mixed in, just under ‘beans’.

I grew them in Rhode Island the year after I moved back from Japan, in recent years I've grown them from the normal soybeans I buy to make soymilk, as well as crazy heirloom varieties from the seed swap (back when people did that kind of thing), but none were specifically for edamame eating, just soybeans. I don't think the variety matters too much.

They take a long time to grow and I'm always kind of disappointed in the yields (one meal from the whole bed!). So maybe stagger planting if you want more.

Thanks for the great idea! I`m putting together my spring garden plans and hadn`t even considered edamame. Will have to find myself some beans.

I am not a fan of soy or tofu, but for the most part, that's just a culinary dislike, along with a general disfavour for a thing that requires so much processing, which becomes potentially dangerous in an industrial food setting.

So much about soy and tofu gets better if you're doing the processing yourself, at home. But some things do not.

Apparently, and I will try to find the article that mentioned this, soy fields are devoid of much of the life present in other crop situations because nothing sees it as food. That might be great from a pest perspective, as it would naturally require fewer to no pesticides to cultivate, from the conventional agriculture perspective, but it's not so good in terms of animal life down to the smallest level living adjacent to those fields.

Are there no other types of bean that can be used in the same way, one that, although perhaps still a result of the Columbian Exchange, has been accepted by microbial and other life here?

-CK

I grew the butterbean variety of edemame one year and they were great! Just a small plot, around 3 feet wide by 30 feet long. It was fun to share them with the neighbors. The good-ol-boys couldn't get enough of them, great with beer!