the leaves on the edamame were starting to turn yellow. most of the pods looked ready to harvest, so i clipped all of the plants at their bases, and stripped the pods off the stems. next i boiled the pods for 5 minutes, dried them in the salad spinner, bagged them and put them in the freezer. we ended up with a little over 5 lbs total, which turns out to be 3 full gallon size freezer bags. each plant had between 7 and 16 pods, with the average being around 10. most of them were fat, and ready, but a few seemed over the hill, and some were tiny, but still yummy. i was amazed at the large amount of biomass (of leaves and stems) compared to the small amount of edamame pods.
clip
strip
boil
bag & freeze
cosmo ate a mess of 'em yesterday. it's one of the only vegetables he truly loves, so i am thrilled to have a freezer full of home-grown.
since soybean roots fix nitrogen, i left them in the ground to enrich the soil. soon i will turn the bed and plant some fall crops like lettuce, spinach & arugula. i hope to build some sort of a cold frame for over-wintering some chard, kale and maybe a few hardy herbs. i'll also be planting some garlic in october.
2 comments:
Oooooh, what a beautiful harvest! I wish that my chickens could eat those bean plants you have leftover - they seem to especially like peppers and beans. Oh, and beets! Yum!
You're the only other person I know (aside from those who sell at the Farmers' Market) who grows edamame! We just love them. The ones you get in restaurants can never be as good as the ones straight from the garden.
We got our garlic in now (Oct). We just hope there won't be any serious floods this coming spring to mess with them.
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