Soybean Glycine max
Soybean is an introduced annual herb, found in the lower 48 states and Puerto Rico. It grows to 3 ft and blooms Jul in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
The soybean, soy bean, or soya bean is a species of legume native to East Asia, widely grown for its edible bean. Soy is a staple crop, the world's most grown legume, and an important animal feed. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.5–7.8
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Height
- 3 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single crown
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Summer
- Fruit
- Brown persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~33 caterpillar species
Glycine supports ~33 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a strong genus for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Glycine in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 20 bee visitors
20 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Soybean — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 7 birds · 1 mammal · 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Soybean — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 7 birds and 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Glycine →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (36) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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