Edamame plants

There is little in the world that's more delicious than the succulent beans from a young edamame pod, steamed lightly with a touch of salt. The thing is: getting fresh edamame in Ottawa is much more challenging than one would hope.

So I decided to buy some beautiful organic seeds a while back from Greta (she's epic, so check her out if you're in the market for seeds). Last summer I had no luck at all with growing them outdoors, so I've decided to pilot a couple of seedlings inside the house over the winter, to see how well they do.

I planted all of these on the 9th of December.

Seedlings about 10 days after planting.

This was the strongest seedling.

As you can see, there is one doing much better than the others, and so I moved it to a larger pot after about 4-5 days and it's growing beautifully. Hilariously, I had some pistachio shells hanging around and so I mixed them into the soil when I transferred it to a bigger pot, and they're sort of serving as a mulch. The plant seems to like it, so I may just hang onto pistachio shells for future attempts! The others are also doing well, though they've only recently been moved out of their original peat pots and sadly, there were no shells left to mulch them.

A close-up look at the strongest of the seedlings, with its fuzzy leaves just beginning!

Adding a thick layer of mulch on the top of the seedling's soil is an important step, I've read. For now, I'm just using broken peat pots, but am looking to get some wood chips or the like so that the layer is thicker. I also haven't watered any of these for about a week. I tend to err on the side of over-watering, and so I've been very careful this time not to do so. It seems like edamame loves a drier soil!

My mulch is torn up peat pots, ones that were broken last time I sprouted seeds in them.

I have high hopes for this one. No doubt, this is the strongest seed and so I'll be keeping lots of beans from this plant for next year's edamame bushes!