Kitchen Garden Forum

Does anybody know anything about growing these?

It's a Japanese snack, and we ate them with a drink before a meal. They are cooked in the pods and served with a splash of sauce and a shake of salt. You eat them by squeezing/sucking the beans out of the pod. Slightly messy but only slightly.

So far a little surfing has revealed that they are properly called Glycine maxima (or sometimes max). They are a variety of soy bean and eaten green, ie immature as soy beans go.

The chef in the restaurant where we ate them yesterday said that he buys them frozen from Japan but he thinks that they are being grown somewhere in the UK.

Somebody in the pub last night said it wasn't hot enough to grow any kind of soy bean anywhere in Britain, which sounds a bit dogmatic, particularly if they are to be eaten green rather than ripe.

T&M list them but (online at least) don't say much about how and why.

Nicky's Seeds list them as a sprouting seed.

Any ideas? Better still, any experiences?

I wanted to have a go a couple of years ago, but none of them germinated and they rotted in the compost. I followed the instructions to the letter and have never failed to germinate anything before (though I have failed to keep the odd thing going after germination). Hopefully someone else can be more positive!

Where did you get the seed - and maybe I can try somewhere else!!