Peanuts!!!!

This post is long overdue...while much of our garden was quite disappointing this year yield-wise and long after everything else had ceased being anything resembling productive or plant-like, these guys pressed on! A true success story!!


Last spring my garden plot partner (in crime...?!) told me she wanted to do peanuts in the garden.
What the...?! We can grow those here? (I'm thinking Georgian or South American plantations or something!)

So we did!

Starting in two neat little rows.

They actually grew quite splendidly, filling out (and overflowing and clawing their way over neighboring plants!) the bed quite abundantly!


(Here they are mid-summer
 almost filling the bed which
 they shared with a few tomatoes
 in the back and the half-crazed,
 hungry zombie-like...um, I mean,
 the gentle crawling, ever
 spreading toward their friends
 in a utopian community  radish plants.)




I knew nothing about how peanuts grow, but apparently they drop little shooters and at the end of each grows a peanut! How exciting!

She was diligent about researching the perfect time to harvest...when the plants turn yellow and not before. Ok, sounds great.
Well, like so many things that refused to die this fall (!!) the peanuts stayed green forever.
And then I left the country and she was insanely busy and suddenly it was like the end of November and we were harvesting very brown peanut plants.

So what's supposed to happen when they're yellow is that you loosen the dirt, grab the plant and gently pull...all those little "fingers" and their danging peanuts will just come along with the plant  - how nice!

Ok, but when it's dead? Yeah, all those little fingers just fall off and so commences on your hands and knees in mud (we'd gotten some good rain) trying to dig out hundreds of lost peanuts.

(sidenote: we're moving the peanuts to a new location next year because we're all about crop rotation, however we have a strong suspicion that we will actually have two peanut beds: the one we plant intentionally and the ones left behind in the dirt that will come up and choke the tomatoes and other plants we have planned for that bed!)

Nightmare harvesting aside...you pull up these plants and there are peanuts! Actual, real life peanuts!!
(I mean, I know, I know, "Well, what did you expect when you planted peanuts?"...but, but, but...peanuts!!!)

An entire 6'x6' or so bed of peanuts! We had 3 trash bags full of peanut plants!

We split the "babysitting" and each hung a bunch up in cooler spaces to dry.

(Remember, they're supposed to be conveniently connected to the plant like the ones pictured at the left, however, since we'd waited too long, we had an abundance of loose peanuts...so how do you dry them?! Well I save citrus bags because they're great for storing/hanging/drying bulbs and so ta da! I made a peanut hammock! :-D)

Then after a few weeks you wipe the dirt of really well (does not work as well as one might hope) and then roast them in the oven and voila! Peanuts! Delicious, real life peanuts!!
That we grew!!

If you can't tell, I'm slightly excited!
They look like peanuts.

They taste like peanuts.
They are peanuts!
And we grew them!!



I think this might be our most successful crop yet out of anything we've grown for 2 years!
(Nothing will ever top the abundance of strawberries and green peppers that first year...that was before I came into the garden plot picture; hence why it's only gone downhill from there.)

Yay, peanuts!

Tune in next time for a pretty fantastic story about peanuts accidentally ending up where they're not supposed to...