Another Bean Option?

[Semisane]

My wife cooks quite a few Chinese dishes using bean sprouts. Sometimes fresh sprouts are hard to find. So I did an on-line search for Mung beans to sprout myself (really easy) and found the best deal at Walmart's web site.

After sprouting a few batches and getting what appears to be a 100% germination rate I decided to throw a handful of those little green spheres into one of my back yard gardens. I'm not sure what date that was, but the plants in the picture below are somewhere in the four to six week range.

I weighed out a quarter-ounce and counted the beans. The total was 187. That's 748 per ounce or about 12,000 Mung beans per pound. That's four times the number of soy beans in a pound.

I do believe a few bags of Mung beans will be scattered in my plots next spring. At $2 a pound for the seed, why not?

 

[mikmaze]

not sure whichy soybeans you looked at, but there is a lot of variety in seeds per lb, I looked at soy last year with a small seed, yielding a Lot of seeds per lb......... looks interesting, and as any other bean near me, it would get hammered in a plot.

 

[Semisane]

A magic GOOGLE search for soybean seed per pound gave me a range of 2,800 per pound for large seed to 3,000 per pound for small seed. That was from one seed vendor. There may be smaller seed available from others.

 

[Bill]

Gotta be careful sometimes those Mung get in the lawn.

 

[SwampCat]

I planted some tecomate lablab plus this year. The lablab is a big seeded bean. The ebony soybean in this mix is quite a bit smaller than regular soybean. It is also vining. It might be good in a mix with sunflower or corn. Not RR. Cant really say the deer are doing much with it, yet.