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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-074
Ice Cream Bean
Inga edulis
Ice Cream Bean grows foot-long pods packed with sweet, vanilla-flavored white pulp - the fruit that gives it its name - and can bear within two years of planting. As a nitrogen-fixing tree it doubles as a shade canopy over coffee and cacao in tropical alley cropping, dropping heavy leaf litter that builds soil and holding cleared slopes with its roots. It coppices well for firewood and yields a moderately hard, durable timber once mature. It needs frost-free warmth and dies outright below about -2 C, so it only survives where winters never truly freeze.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 9–12
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Moderate · Wet
Vertical layer
Canopy- Soil pH
- 5–6.5
- Plant type
- Evergreen Tree
- Mature height
- 59 ft
- Mature spread
- 59 ft
- Plant spacing
- 32.8–49.2 ft
- Root type
- Not yet recorded
- Spread pattern
- Seed
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The deeper layer
Plan what comes next.
- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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