Soybeans, damn that was fast!

[blueadzuki]

Hi all

I wanted to tell you all about and interesting development vis a vis my soybean. A few days ago, while watering one of the pots, I though I saw a few patches of white at the base of some of the leaves. Sure enough, one or two of the plants actually already have flower buds (I though I saw two, but when I went to tag, I only found one, that was deeply forked, so I may have been looking at two branches of the same plant. The seed was planted around the 21st of March, so we are looking at seed to flower in 61 days. That does not sound that impressive until you consider that 1. becuse of the ultra cold springe we are having, anything planted this year (barring a few very cold loving plants) has been in virtual stasis for most of the time; the temps only got warm enough for anything to really start growing about 3-4 weeks ago. 2. If the plant I saw is from the seed I think it came from, it was from the second planting, which was about 28 days AFTER the first so those would only be 33 days old.
Now the even more impressive thing, while going through the pot I saw another plant that has done one better, not only has it already flowered but it has already podded! they are still small pods, but there are a lot of them. And I mean a LOT. Due to varios circumstances, an awful lot of my soybean plants produce 1-3 flowers/pods and average maybe 18 inches total length. This one is about 9 inches, and has about 30. I have a suspicion that those pods may be small (quite a few of the soybeans seeds I planted were some white ones I found in some green chickpeas, which were quite small (though not as small as the itsy bitsy seed I found last year, I haven't planted that one yet) I was so impressed by being so early I gave them a "free pass" and tagged them both, even though both probably have white flowers (at the beginning of the season, I decided that any plants that were white flowered would have thier pods eaten (as edamame), and any whose flowers were some other color (lavender, two tone, etc. which is about 2% of the population with the black strain that makes up nearly all of my beans) would be marked for seed production (that way, next year I'll have an easy way to tell seed I actually planted from volunteer plants from the soy I throw around as green manure.)

[12540dumont]

Blue, I don't know how you do it. I have never gotten one soybean off any soybeans I have ever planted. I plant, the birds pull them up and I never see a darn one. I planted 4x last year.

[steev]

I've gotten beans from soybeans I've planted. Damned few and not worth the trouble. I don't blame the beans; I clearly don't know what I'm doing. I planted six varieties last year; I killed six varieties last year. The only soybean that had even limited success was one bean that sprouted late in my Pinkeye cowpeas and grew protected from both me and the elements.

[blueadzuki]

May 24, 2012 23:31:35 GMT -5 12540dumont said:

Blue, I don't know how you do it. I have never gotten one soybean off any soybeans I have ever planted. I plant, the birds pull them up and I never see a darn one. I planted 4x last year.

Here are the few tricks I have learned

1. Rodents (squirrels and chipmunks) LOVE emerging soybean sprouts, pretty much above and beyoned anything else. So you really have two options to get plants, either have a really good barricade up (the sensible method) or do like I do and overplant so massively (by a factor of several 100 to 1) that the animals can't eat all of them before the mature) for selected seed, it also can help to grow them insuide until they have thier first true leaves, as by then the cotyledons are usually exausted enough that the plants hold no interest for the animals.

2. Keep your seed plants in pots and place them on tall, slender pedestals the animals can't climb. Being in pots also comes in handy for when the birds show up, since in a really bad pinch, you can simply move the pot inside.

3. check the plants daily. Soybean flowers are TINY and sit low, so you usually can't see them looking at the plants from above. Come the part of the year when the general plants start flowering, i'll probably have to check them on my belly which is going to be disgusting (since another byproduct of my overplanting is that a lot of seed doesn't germinate at all and simply rots, so the ground below the beans always has a 3 inch think layer of rotten soy (and if you put enough beans in a pile and let them rot, at best the resuly smells like spoiled natto, more often it smells like dog shit.) , muck, mold and other sticky stinky stuff.

And I'm not all that sure I'm much better at growing soy than either of you, yest, I managed to get seed off maybe 12 plants last year, but that was after taking them back inside for something on the order of three months (after birds ate all of the pods off half of them) and even then, the seed was not exactly as ripe as it could have been. With one exception all of the beans were green when I took them off the plant (though they blackend to thier normal color as they dried, maybe the black always works like that).

[mountaindweller]

And what do you do with these soybeans? I read that they are not very healthy eating unless you make traditional fermented stuff like soysauce or tofu, and did you try this? Do you have recipes?

[blueadzuki]

That really wasn't a concern last year, between the birds and the squirrels, there were so few seeds left at the end that doing anything except putting them to the side for future planting was not feasible.
This year, it depends on which plants where. The plants in the pot on the patio are also probably going to largely go to see saving, as most of them were off types picked out for testing, so each plant needs quite a few seeds saved from it.
The pot on the side of the house and the vegetable garden are part of a gentic experiment I am running to make a sweeter tasting edamame, so assumming that they make enough pods that I don't need to save every seed from them as well (not likely the patio only has maybe 2 pods currently in the whole pot, and there's probably only a handful in the garden.) I'd probably run the test.
If I ever DID get enough to really have a turnover such that there was more than my edamame hungry family could eat and I needed to save for future growth, I'd probably make soymilk a little more often. The base soybeans I have seem to lack the gene that makes for the "beany" taste, so they are a good candidate for soymilk for the low tech home user (well, they are if you can get used to drinking milk that is green....)

[raymondo]

Mmmm...edamame...one of the treats of the warm season garden!

[MikeH]

Jun 27, 2012 6:30:12 GMT -5 blueadzuki said:

The base soybeans I have seem to lack the gene that makes for the "beany" taste, so they are a good candidate for soymilk for the low tech home user (well, they are if you can get used to drinking milk that is green....)

From experience, I can say that these beans - www.fairviewfarms.com/ - make a soy beverage with no beany taste. In an email exchange, I was able to confirm that they are triple-null lipoxygenase soybeans although they wouldn't say what they were called before they were called Laura. Part of the trick is NOT to soak them overnight but rather to boil them for 60 to 80 minutes changing the water every 20 minutes.

[blueadzuki]

UPDATE

I am now harvesting a few pods. All of #1 has been harvested (for simplicity each plant was numbered a few weeks ago so I could keep track of which drying container contained wihich plants seed. so from here on in each one will be referred to by a #) as well as one pod from #2 and two from #3. Goung down the line

Plant #1(bush type) produced 4 pods, with a total of 11 beans. To my surpise, while I seem to recall all of the beans that went into the pot being either green, white, or brown, as #1 seed cured it turned black (I should mention here, for the purposes of clarification, that a lot of soybeans do not get their final seed coat color until they have dried down, so even if the seed is fully mature, when it leaves the pod, it is often still a flat green. The final color comes later) To be completely accurate it is black with a green ridge running down the spine (the area opposite the hilum). Sort of Like a green and black version of the pattern on Agate.

Plant #2 (Bush type (though sprawling, with a lot of forks) appears to be rather similar in most traits to 1, though there are a LOT more pods (probably about 20) Based on the seed from the one pod I have collected so far, the seed cures to a dirty olive, with a touch of brown or black just over the hypcotly.

Plant#3 is apparantly the only "pole type" (i.e. climbing) soybean of this year's test. That is it's the only one whiose main shoot is a dripping crawler. The seed color appearst to be a sort of glazed pale green, but don't hold me to that, as the seed I am basing it on was retrived from a pod that a squirrel had gnawed off; so it may have not been fully mature.

Technically plant #4 died without producing any pods, but since I don't want any gaps in my files, I moved it's tag over to plant #7, and that is now #4

#5 was the first of the two I mentioned in the first post (the one that had flower buds) That one proved to be quite unusual. Not only were the flowers lavender, not white (remember I said that almost all of mine are white) they were, by soybean standards, ENORMOUS, about the size of the indiviual flowers of a bird's foot trefoil panicle. They also stayed open far longer than was normal (most of the time, soy flowers only last a day, these stayed open almost a week) and were very tightly clustered. It has also got to be the strictest bush type I have ever seen, it could more accurately be called a "stick" type (i.e. no branches at all). Lots of pods, but none are ripe yet

#6 was the second one I mentioned orginally (the one that was already full of pods) Unforunately that ones seems to not have the potential I at first thought it did. While I does make pods super early, it's less off a "make a lot of pods that give you lots of early beans" and more of "make a lot of pods 99% of which are completely sterile and just stay there. The whole plant has only one fertile pod, and that has only one seed. I think this one's a no starter)

Technically there is a plant #8 and #9, but since #8 has only a few starts of pods that seem to be dying before doing anything, and #9 has no pods or buds at all, they can probably be written off now.

Will update when I have new information. I also plant to crack the coat of the smallest seed from each plant (excluding 6, where the is only one seed) to figure out whether the beans are yellow inside or green inside ones (there were both in the orginal planting).

[blueadzuki]

UPDATE

1. I got plants #1 and #2 mixed up (realized as I took more beans) plant 2 is the one with the two tone seeds, plant 1 is the olivey ones

2. finshed harvesting #3, total crop 17 seeds