as it is

SOYBEAN IS SUCH A versatile plant. It’s been used so extensively in glues, paints, lubricants, and plastics. As long ago as 1935, each Ford automobile ate up a bushel of these beans in one form or another.

And what a food for humans! Soybeans are rich in high-quality protein. Though the boiled, dry beans have a strong, waxy flavor (awful, to me at least), they can be rendered palatable in the form of soy sprouts, soy milk, soy sauce, miso, roasted soybeans, and tempeh. Tofu, reputedly invented by a Chinese scholar in 164 BC, has little flavor, but readily latches onto other flavors, so becomes tasty once candied, steamed, deep fried, smoked, marinated, boiled, or fermented.

Let’s now go full circle and come back to soybean in its most primitive state: edamame, that is, the green, immature beans. Edamame has the same relationship to the dry bean as fresh peas have to dry peas — thoroughly different in taste and texture.

Quickly cooked, young, tender soybeans are delicious. Though grocers’ shelves are lined with all sorts of foods containing soybeans (not to mention the packaging and the shelves themselves), you rarely see edamame for sale in produce aisles or in cans. If you want to eat soybean in its delectable, green state, you mostly have to grow it. I recommend you plant a row. Soybeans are amongst the easiest of beans to grow. Japanese beetles enjoy the foliage, but otherwise no other pests of note bother the plants. Even Mexican bean beetles leave the plants alone.

Oh, I forgot: rabbits also love soybeans, so much so that some gardeners recommend planting a row of soybeans as a decoy to keep rabbits from other plants. Perhaps rabbits will do little damage to soybeans because there are so many other green things to eat in summer. For insurance, I recommend a fence, and it doesn’t take much of a fence to keep rabbits at bay.

When I started growing soybeans, seed was unavailable so I would just go to the local health food store and buy a handful of dry soybeans to plant. A number of soybean varieties bred especially for edamame are now readily available; “Shirofumi” is my favorite. Plant seeds just like bush beans, dropping each seed four inches apart in furrows a couple of inches deep around the date of the last spring frost, typically in mid-May. The plants grow as small bushes, about two feet high and wide, so rows should be 2 feet apart.

The seeds germinate rapidly in warm soil, and in a couple of months, beans will start to swell within their pods. Soybean flowering is keyed to daylength, and different varieties (there are thousands) flower at different daylengths. Time to maturity also varies, from about 60 days for the quickest varieties to more than 90 days for the longest.

The time to harvest soybeans is when the fuzzy pods are plump and just beginning to lose their bright, green color. Beans from a single planting continue to ripen over the course of about two weeks. After that, I pull the plants and cart them off to the compost pile.

Cook green soybeans by boiling them in water, pods and all, for five minutes. Then cool them quickly, and eat them by squeezing each pod so that the three or so beans within pop out into your mouth. Shelling a bowlful can be tedious; not so for popping them into your mouth as you eat them. Even a modest planting yields plenty of pods. Bag any extra cooked pods and freeze them.

Any gardening questions? Email them to me at garden@ leereich.com and I’ll try answering them directly or in this column. Come visit my garden at leereich.com/blog.