Soybeans

I picked 107 pods from this one soy plant - that's about 321 delicious little edamame beans. I noticed that the roots of this plant were particularly loaded with nodules of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Examining other plants, it was consistent that the largest plants with the highest yield had more nodules on their roots. Do more nodules make the plant healthier, or do healthier plants support more nodules?

Last Saturday, we harvested the last of the soybeans.  We did not stagger the planting, so (unlike bush beans or pole beans) soybeans become ready to harvest about the same time.  Despite this, we manage to spread out our takings over four weeks. 

This one soybean plant had about 50 pods, each with two or three beans. It's like a meal on every plant.

The nodules on the roots are where the nitrogen-fixing bacteria live. Soybeans feed themselves!

Beans planted the same time often yield about the same time.  However, we're getting a few early beans.  No one can tell the soybeans (several inches taller than the bush beans) had ever struggled against leaf-eating pests when seedlings.  At first glance, one could see no soybean prospects.  But hidden under the top canopy of leaves, close to the stem, one finds bunches.  Plenty to look forward to!

On Wednesday, it was amazing to see no leaf damage in the soybeans.  They are actually looking better than the bush beans!  Did the soybeans regenerate leaf-parts eaten?  There is a theory that plants respond vigorously to stress.  Maybe a mild pest attack inspires soybeans to greater productivity?  It would be ironic then, that pesticide-happy farmers might actually be hurting their crops by eliminating natural sources of stress.  On the other hand, many of the cabbage plants succumbed to -something-, so stress may not be a good thing for all plants.

Meanwhile, the bush beans have started flowering.  Maybe they look less explosive because they are now putting less energy into leaves and more energy into beans.

We are growing two different kinds of beans:  bush beans and soy beans.  The soy beans have been repeatedly attacked by plant-eating pests, while the bush beans have escaped unscathed.  Some weeks ago, with the beans just poking their heads out of the ground, one gardener was concerned that the leaves were being eaten already.  But these were not true leaves, but cotyledons, which come from part of the seed.  In the two weeks which followed, though, as the true leaves emerged, pests continued to eat at the soy bean plants.  I wonder what they know?  Nevertheless, the soy bean plants themselves have been producing more leaf than is being eaten.

This situation makes a point about pesticide use as well.  Yes, perhaps a heavy dose of pesticide might have eliminated any leaf-eating.  But the soybean plants are clearly thriving despite the pests.  Maybe pesticides aren't as useful or needful as advertised.

It seems like the soybeans are not doing as well as the bush beans, at least partially because something is attacking them.  We found seedlings that had been chopped off before fully sprouting:

and seemingly healthy seedlings that had little pieces chewed out of them:

Curious.

Beans were planted today, both soy beans and bush beans.  Or rather, some of them.  If beans are planted all at once, they arrive pretty much all at once.  Instead, we're spacing plantings two weeks apart, so that they arrive spread out over many weeks.