A small portion of the edamame in my garden this year. I planted more than ever, but will reap the rewards this winter.
Back in the early spring, I planted edamame. A LOT of edamame, in fact — a pound of seeds, which took up 25% of the space in my garden and even then I still had to find other places to plant. I ended up putting extra seeds in every available nook and cranny, including around the blueberry bushes and in a flower bed.
The payoff on all that time spent on my hands and knees is all the beans I’ll be harvesting in the next few weeks. In fact, my family returned from a vacation last week and an hour after we pulled into the garage, I was out in the garden picking edamame pods for that night’s dinner.
Obviously, we won’t be able to eat all that edamame at once, so what I’ll be doing is blanching the pods with the beans still in them, then shelling the beans after they’ve cooled off a bit. I’ll freeze all the edamame and have lots of yummy beans this fall and winter. I’m cautiously estimating that I’ll put at least five pounds of shelled beans in the freezer. My family is delighted, because edamame is one of our favorite vegetables and something that my girls will actually snack on after school.
Yes, I could just buy frozen edamame at the grocery store (and I do) butI discovered last year that virtually all of the edamame in grocery stores was grown in China. Considering how many hundreds of acres of land in Virginia alone is given over to growing soybeans (the crops are used to replenish the soil in corn fields and the beans are given to livestock), I am appalled that grocery stores are importing food from thousands of miles away. In addition to having concerns about any food coming out of China — even those foods that are labeled organic — I don’t like the food miles associated with foods coming from the other side of the globe. That’s just not acceptable to me, which is why grow as much as I do.
In addition, edamame is also good for my garden. It adds nitrogen back to the soil and helps replenish nutrients depleted by heavy feeders like corn and tomatoes. I rotate where I plant everything, so in 2011, I’ll put edamame where the tomatoes were in 2010.
If you get a chance to grow edamame next year, I encourage you to plant some. It’s incredibly easy — you just stick the seeds in the ground in the spring and then walk away for two months. It requires absolutely no work at all and will add a lot to your dinners.
