‘VT Sweet’: A vegetable soybean cultivar for commercial edamame production in the mid‐Atlantic USA

摘要: Commercially viable cultivars adapted to U.S. production regions that meet consumer acceptance criteria are desperately needed by the growing domestic edamame industry. Here, we report the development and release of ‘VT Sweet’ (Reg. no. CV‐542, PI 699062), the first vegetable soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] cultivar released by Virginia Tech. VT Sweet is a late maturity group (MG) V cultivar (relative maturity 5.6, 129 d to harvest) with determinate growth habit, purple flowers, gray pubescence, tan pod wall, and yellow hila. VT Sweet has superior characteristics for edamame such as large pod size (13.9 g/10 pods; 40.4 mm long, 11.4 mm wide, and 7.6 mm thick) and low one‐bean pod proportion (15%), as well as low pod pubescence density (359 hairs/2.4 cm2). VT Sweet also showed high overall consumer acceptability (6.0 ± 1.7; 9 = like extremely) and favorable tolerance to native pests. When compared …