Moffat Tofu?

The soybean harvest has begun.

Back in spring last year, the idea of growing soybeans in the Scottish uplands felt somewhere between an experiment and an act of insane optimism. Last year’s harvest did nothing to build our confidence – we gathered seven beans in total.

But we are nothing if not persistent. Encouraged by a vegan child, spurred on by new seeds and with our TimberTunnel potting ‘shed’ fully operational, an early sowing produced about 70 plants—all of which I planted out, which is so not like me.

Those plants were surprisingly straggly but still had a number of pods, and are now turning brown and ready for harvest.

If we wanted them as edamame, we would have picked them while they were green and hairy, like the photo. Instead we let our beans fully mature and dry. The plan is to hand them over to my vegan child to turn them into tofu.

There are still several stages at which this could go gloriously wrong. Transforming the now hard and shrunken beans into something recognisably resembling tofu will be a totally new experiment. Production volumes are an issue too – even though every seed germinated and every plant cropped, we probably still only have enough for about a single block of tofu.

But for now, there are home-grown soybeans getting harvested in Moffat. That feels exciting enough.

Moffat tofu may yet be a thing!