I dried, shelled, and weighed all the soybeans that I harvested.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Not a particularly good result; I harvested 30% of what I had sown. So, from that point of view, it is a failure. However, the bought seed had an abysmal germination rate; most of it has rotted in the ground (over 95%). So I took 20 of these seeds – 10 of the biggest and 10 of the really small and still slightly green – and I put them on a wet towel to test the germination rate.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
This morning, 19 out of 20 germinated. The last one germinated in the evening too. So I am at the very least hopeful that I managed to grow reliable seed for the next year. However, I will probably do things differently next year. I won’t sow a big dedicated soybean patch; I will sow it around the edges of all the grain patches that I will be growing. And at least for some of them, I won’t sow them directly in the ground – I will try to first grow small plants in pots and then carefully transplant them, just as I usually do with runner beans, bush beans, and pole beans. If all that fails again and I get less than I have sown, then I will at least know I cannot grow this crop at all.
Triggered by this post, I learned that soy beans are a “short day crop”, but “day length neutral cultivars” apparently exist (source). To be honest, I wasn’t even aware you could grow soybeans here in Europe.
From that same source, there is a company called Prograin Zia in the Chech Republic that has those cultivars. They even have a catalog (PDF). I don’t know if they sell to consumers, though.
@rsmith, if you re-read some older postings about this year’s soybean exploits in my garden, I mention that.
The variant that I tried to grow, “Liska”, should be suitable for my environment. It is, alas, the only variety that I can buy as a private gardener.