Adventures in Growing Black Soybeans

Over the years I’ve shared some of my gardening adventures with you, such as when I (finally!) figured out how to successfully grow artichokes in one season and my joy of discovering and growing ajvarski peppers, which will be in my garden forever more.

This year I decided to try my hand at growing black soybeans, specifically Hokkaido Black Soya Beans, from Baker’s Creek Heirloom Seeds. I thought that growing my own edamame could be fun since I’ve never grown soybeans before. I grew regular black beans for a couple of years with great success but they took up a lot of room for not a lot of yield. They were fun to grow but not worth the garden space considering how cheaply you can buy dried organic black beans.

I grew rattlesnake beans a couple of years ago and they were well worth the fence space they consumed. Rattlesnake beans are easy to grow and a 2 for your money type of bean – I show you here how you can eat them while they’re young and green and/or let them dry on the vine and harvest the dried beans.

My thought process with growing soybeans was that because I was growing them for edamame, I wouldn’t need to plant a lot of them. I was dead wrong but not for that reason. I found out the hard way that soybean plants are basically crack for bunnies. I’m convinced we had rabbits inviting the neighbor rabbits over for early morning feasts on my soybean stalks. Now, this would not have been quite so heartbreaking if they’d eaten the plants off when they were still young but they waited until the plants were fully grown and actually starting to produce soybeans.

As a home gardener in a wooded neighborhood, I’ve dealt with many a plant and plot of greens getting devoured by not just rabbits but also raccoons, chipmunks, deer, fox, and groundhogs. I actually expect a little destruction in my garden each year but watching fully-grown plants being mysteriously (well, it was a mystery in the beginning) being broken in half and devoured was not only frustrating but a little heartbreaking.

And then I caught a cute little bunny in the act and the perp had a face. A cute, furry face but also an evil, destructive face. Since killing bunnies is not an option for me, I let it and its brothers and sisters eat my 15 or so stalks down to about 4.

I truly believe the only reason they stopped is that they grew too fat to fit through the garden fence.

I ended up with 2 harvests and that’s a generous word for what I actually picked off the plants.

Here’s a shot at the first “harvest”, which I honestly picked thinking I might not see any more of them as the summer progressed.

Quite a haul, right?

But being the trooper I am I steamed those babies up, sprinkled them with sea salt, and my husband and I enjoyed our teeny tiny servings of black soybean edamame.

After all of this, I can happily tell you that the flavor of these is outstanding. It’s a little richer and more intense than typical edamame and while they’d not turned truly black yet (which they don’t until they’ve dried) they had a darker skin on them and we could have easily eaten a stockpot full of them.  You can see the darker skins on some of them in my photo below.

So after our not-very-filling first batch, I let the remaining stalks do their thing until the cooler September weather finally prompted me to just harvest what was left and throw the damn stalks in the burn pile.

With the exception of the ravenous bunnies, these were very easy to grow and didn’t require any special maintenance. They got a helping of mushroom compost early in their growth and that was about it aside from regular watering. Each stalk produced a multitude of pods.

What you see below is the varying degree of colors from some of my final harvest. You can see that as they age and dry, their color deepens from green to red, to deep purplish-red, to black.

Proof once again that nature is amazing.

The reason I was drawn to growing black soybeans in the first place is that black and purple foods are rich in anthocyanins, which are a powerful antioxidant. If you’re looking for ways to eat more anthocyanin-rich food, you need to try my easy Black Rice Sushi Rolls. They’re full of veggies and seaweed and, of course, black rice. I’ve also shared my recipe for Braised Black Lentils which is still one of my husband’s favorite side dishes.

It wasn’t until I was in the midst of growing these that I realized the soybeans wouldn’t turn black until they were fully matured and past the edamame stage of enjoying them. That’s okay though. I still got to discover just how delicious they are and how stunningly beautiful they are in their varying stages of maturity. Growing black soybeans to their fully-black stage simply means leaving them on the plants until the pods turn brown. Once they’ve turned brown you harvest and peel them to discover wonderful black soybeans.

So that is my adventure of growing Hokkaido black soybeans in my garden. Easy to grow, (particularly if you don’t live around rabbits), beautiful to look at, and absolutely delicious.

If I grow them again next year, I’ll have to consider an electric fence. 🙂