That's an excellent question, and one we haven't entirely answered yet ourselves. We planted the soybeans as a cover crop, and thus pulled up some at the first-bloom stage to act as green manure around sweet corn. (The sweet corn is growing very well, by the way.)

The remaining beds are an areas slated for fall garlic. But since the soybean pods are nearly fully mature already and the garlic won't be planted for another couple of weeks, I'm thinking I'll try to harvest at least enough soybean pods so I can thresh them and use the seeds to plant next year's cover crop.

The pods I'm too lazy to harvest will instead turn into goat fodder. I don't want to let our girls have too many of the rich beans all at once, but Abigail and Artemesia will definitely eat as many soybean pods as I'll let them...yes, even when they have to wade through wet grass to get there. I guess that's one way to make our herd queen deign to dine on a dewy day.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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