The ideal participant of the soy in 1000 garden project has a passion for gardening, a commitment to helping science and is open to sustainable garden practices. Other than that, the only real requirement is to have access to one square meter of garden to plant soy and the ambition to monitor the plants from spring until the end of summer. Everything starts in April, when the participants receive their goodie bag with seeds, soil samples are taken and they fill in a questionnaire. Early May, the participants plant 60 seeds and report which seeds have germinated. At the start of the summer they pick 10 plants to monitor and report on different parameters such as plant height, branching and leave color. Towards the end of the summer, the scientists collect 5 out of those 10 plants to be phenotypes in the lab. The participants monitor the remaining 5 plants until half of October when they’ve lost all their leaves and it is time to count the number of pods and beans.