Soy for your garden

So it's fall time and starting to get cold.
There was frost on my windshield this morning.
I decided it's time to get rid of the remaining flowers in the flower bed so I can transform it into a vegetable garden next year.
Since it was previously a flower bed, I don't know what's the state of the soil, how much nutrients are in it etc. So I decided to heavily fertilize my soil to make sure it's ready for growing vegetables next year.

My fertilizer of choice is....soybeans!

Yes that's right, soy beans. Why Soy?
Soybean is a rich in protein and is usually used as a supplement for protein in vegetarian diets.
The microorganism loves the protein as much as we do and will use it and in return create nitrogen for your soil!

Soymeal adds 7% Nitrogen, 2% Phosphorus and 1% Potassium.
The process to make soymeal is a little different from soy milk since I boil the ground up bean to make milk instead of keeping it in powder form. And the oil is not exactly extracted in the process to make soy milk. But it's almost the same so the ratios of the type of nutrients it'll provide is not far off.

I currently do not have a compost so I'm burying the ground soybeans right into the soil after I finish making soy milk.
But honestly,  this takes forever because 1/3 cup of soybeans makes about 1L of soy milk.
It'll take me forever to make enough soy by products to dump into the garden. And I'll feel guilty if I boil the beans and then throw it into the garden without using it for anything else first. (Boil first to eliminate risk it'll grow into a plant next year.)

Doing it a bit at a time is great for in season trench composting if you want to give that a try.
But right now I'm trying to get my garden ready for winter. So I went to a tofu shop and brought several bags of soy leftovers for $1 each. It's the exact same product I make but they have it in huge quantities because they mass produce soy milk to make tofu.
The bags I brought were huge so it was perfect for fertilizing my entire garden before winter stars. Much cheaper then buying compost and it's organic!

Give it a try before the frost sets

Categories: Gardening