Edamame: The Importance of Seed Vigor

The success of soya bean cultivation largely depends on the development of the seedlings. In addition to the time and details of the sowing, good seed germination and -vigor are a key to success.

Soya bean seeds are more sensitive to stress during the harvesting, cleaning and drying process than other types of legume crops. Strong seed vigor is unfortunately still the exception, despite the sharp increase of the cultivation areas in Europe. In many cases, the systems used by large-scale multiplicators are simply not designed for soya beans, and a lot of know-how in the seed sector has been lost due to the overall decline in legumes.

Edamame seeds are twice as large as normal soya bean seeds, and therefore even more sensitive. They also need a long, mild autumn in order to ripen healthily. Due to the lower sowing rate, an even and uninterrupted emergence in the field is also more important with edamame soya than with dry soya.

If you grow edamame for fun and have a really warm garden, you can of course also produce your own seeds from our varieties. The gentlest way to produce new seeds is by hand-harvesting the kernels when they’re still relatively moist and ripe, followed by air drying.

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