Peanuts - Part 2

In my last post I described finding out how peanuts grow underground...from peanuts! Novel, idea.

For that reason, the rotten peanuts from my first harvested batch were thrown away instead of composted. However, I completely forgot in my next batch.

I realized it a day or so later and mentioned to my husband: "Oh dear I composted the rotten peanuts, so I need to go scoop those out so that we don't have compost peanut plants spread throughout our gardens!"

He smiled, turned, and asked if I saw the one the squirrel buried.

I look at him horrified...oh no! I never once thought about the squirrels!! They're going to steal them from the compost bin and bury them all over the yard and we'll have peanut plants everywhere and oh no, oh no! Etc., etc.

Pause, while I back-up a bit.
In our yard we have, um..."special" squirrels. They are seriously, hilariously, neurotic. One particular little runt with a scruffy tail I named "Hammy" (like from 'Over the Hedge') I would watch him ruuuuuun all the way around the yard, dart up this tree, stop halfway, race back down, across the ground, dart up another, race down to the ground, spin around, chase his tail in circles, look like he was very badly doing a "bob and weave" tactic across the yard to avoid gunfire... hi-LAR-ious!
I even saw one fall off a fence! Like I said: special!


Ok, so, while I'm in angst about how we'll NEVER find all the peanuts they bury, husband continues to smile calmly and says, "Not when you see this one. Come. Time for a little journey."

He grabs a flashlight and out the front door we go to the edge of the driveway (there's a small rectangle island of grass between the driveway, tulip border, front stoop and bed against the house) and right there next to it he shows me this:

I died.

So, so, so funny!

Our poor little, "special" squirrels tried so hard to bury a treasure they found. Oh how excited they must have been...look at these rare gems that were delivered right to our playground! How yummy...how perfect! I'm going to hide it some place special where no one will find it!

Pat, pat...well, done little fellow, well done.

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...

Peeks of Spring!

Tuesday was 70 degrees.    SEVENTY!!!!

I had been seeing little friends poke their little green heads up in the tulip border and so it was the perfect day...get out there to pull weeds so the bed was beautifully clean and ready for blooming!
Oh it felt sooooo good to be outside like that - so warm and being back in the dirt. Ahhhhhhhh.

Not only are the bulbs shooting little green tips up, but one of the crocuses is blooming!! There, amidst the weeds, actually blooming!!

The bed with all its winter weeds...

And as I pulled weeds around the still-green plants that I was sure would die back so that I only have spring bulbs coming up in the bed in the spring, I found little bulbs trying to poke their way up under them. Oh lovely.

When I want something to stay green and hardy and fill a bed, it dies.
When I want something to die back to a stub all winter so that I can have a clean bed for spring, it stays and greens and fills and overtakes and confuses.
I can't win!

But look at them all popping!

Well, it is now cleared and clean and beautiful and ready for a glory of crocuses and tulips and whatever else I planted and forgot about!!

Seed Order Prep

I keep alternating between "I'm so busy, it's nice to have a few months garden-free" and "OH MY WORD CAN IT PLEASE BE SPRING SO I CAN GARDEN??!!"

The latter is becoming more frequent. Especially when garden plot partner brought seed catalogs into work. Oh no. We were goners.
An estimated $130 later and we realize we probably need to reel it in a bit!

So hopefully in the next few weeks we'll finalize the {smaller} order and seeds here we come! (Or, actually, here they come...?)

Meanwhile we do have gardening work to do in the form of a bit of a craft.
What are these little cuties, you ask?!

Seed pots, of course!!

How genius is that?! She found this idea online and thus began our hoarding of toilet paper and paper towel rolls to cut into little seed starter pots. Perfect size!

Just need to get crafting here soon so we have enough.

I'm almost as excited about the little pots as I am about what will {hopefully} grow out of them!!

Coooome on spring!

Green in the Winter

Well, I've shared in several posts about the front beds that bloomed well into the fall and stayed green even after!

The front border at the end of November:

 In mid-December:

And in mid-January:

As mentioned, I had finally gotten in and cleared out the cannas and other bulbs along with various other dead-things-fall-clean-up-that-actually-happened-in-winter.

And so it looks respectably normal for winter - the evergreens staying green, the mums never making it more than a week (so I'm 0 for 2 two years in a row. Think I'm giving up on them and putting the pots to better use), the cilantro thriving, but then of course this year's there's the very not-normal green of snapdragons.

So I research snapdragons because, what the heck?! Are they an annual or not?

Ok, according to gardeningknowhow.com, they are actually considered a short-lived perennial. Huh.

(Dear nursery: why you label as annual?)

Note the other thing I highlighted. Accidental gardener gets mighty nervous when "a little preparation" is mentioned (although keep in mind my new theory about instructions to gardeners).

And then there's this excerpt:

Hot summers, check. Mild winters...uh, actually depending on the year, no, not really at all.

Supposedly they bloom in spring and fall only. 

Or try all spring, summer and fall...or is that just mine...?

And then what's that part about foliage dying back and plants "melt[ing] into the ground"??

Take a look at the photos above...no melting. Snowed on and frozen and drenched, yes. But not melting.

Ok, so in theory, after my plants melt into the ground, they will come back in the spring if I mulch. Eh. Mulch isn't my thing, so sorry, guys. Guess I could put down some compost. But composting in my front yard scares me now.

And then I go on to read these little highlighted gems...

Uh oooohhhhhhhhh.

Haven't you always wanted a snapdragon border?! :-D

So, what a spring it shall be! Can't wait to see what it holds.

A Moment of Silence...

[Taps playing on a lone trumpet]


Well, as mentioned in my December update, I did get out one day in mid-December after we had gotten a few frosts and I thinned out the cannas and left the ones I wanted to grow next year in the ground.
In their usual form they did multiply like crazy and I basically had my whole edible garden covered in them! I didn't get a picture, though :-(

I then left them out in the garden to dry because I just don't have space inside.

And then it rained.

And finally when there was threat of heavy freezing a few days later, I ran outside, scooped them up and dropped them in a 5 gallon bucket which they overflowed and so the rest just sat on a towel on the floor inside the door.

Several weeks later and we're cleaning the downstairs "slash" room (laundry slash workshop slash mudroom slash gardening center slash...etc.) and I finally got my summer bulbs into mesh bags, hung them in the utility closet which stays a few degrees colder than the rest of the house and went to do the same to the canna bulbs in the bucket and ... ew!

Guess what happens when you put damp bulbs still covered in dirt into a bucket and leave them there for weeks where air can't get to them?

Mmmmm-hmmm. Grossness, that's what.

They were all fuzzy and awful. And it was 10 degrees outside (ok, maybe 30, but all cold feels like 10 to me!) So I just chucked them on top of the compost pile, covered them with leaves and their stalks/leaves I'd previously chopped down and there they shall stay to rot away or - knowing my history - hopefully start to sprout a bit!

It's no great loss because I had to severely thin them out and have nowhere else to put them. I was just going to do my annual "who wants canna bulbs?!" and try to get rid of them that way.
But I hate, hate, hate wasting growing things! (Which has absolutely nothing to do with letting a 30 foot vine grow in my front yard...ahem.)

Plus, my coworker had offered to do vandalism gardening with me (she had a far nicer name for it which I can't remember...but I think mine is appropriate: you just find out of the way places along roads, near woods, etc. and plant bulbs and voila! Beautiful! How on earth did THOSE lovely growing things just spring up randomly in the woods?! No idea!!)

Alas.

Rest in peace, canna bulbs.

Though, I fully expect at least a partial resurrection come spring-time!
Stay tuned.

Christmas Flowers!

Obviously in winter there is little happening in the world of gardening, but not nothing!

In the summer my coworker asked if I wanted a spare Christmas Cactus she had.

Ok, class, what do you say when you're offered a free plant?
Let's all say it together now, boys and girls:

Um, YES!

So home I trot, the proud mama of a Christmas Cactus which I know nothing about other than don't overwater it...?

'Round abouts October I (or in all probability, my husband) remember that you actually have to do something with this plant if it's going to bloom in the winter. Great.

I look it up and realize that what you're supposed to do should have started in September - off to a great start - and it involves dehydrating it, storing it in a cool place, with just the right humidity level, leaving it in the dark, but not too dark, but only overnight and then boiling toads under the full moon and sprinkling the plant with that liquid mixed with droplets of your blood and essence of...yeah, anyway...basically a process that didn't bode well for this accidental gardener.

Stop watering? Check. That is the one step I notoriously succeed at.

And put it in a dark-ish place...apparently it needs some light, but not directly and absolutely under no circumstances should it have any light overnight!

Ok, a thirsty, vampire Christmas Cactus. Check.

I moved it to our lower level where it's cooler (but, like 62, not 50 with less than 40% humidity or whatever they say it's supposed to be) and at least we keep the shades closed all day down there. So I figured, what the heck, it's better than upstairs in full light, so we'll just see.

And see we did!

Right around Christmas-time it DID start blooming!! I was amazed!!

It was sooooo beautiful! A wonderful pop of color with so much deadness around outside (well, sort of...that'll be a later post).

So my conclusion in this whole craziness is not that I did everything right, but in fact that most articles and care instructions are meant to scare away people who hate plants and be a self-esteem booster to those who love plants, but suck at them. "Yay! Look! I did it right! I'm so good! Go me!"

And then there's me, who knows myself well enough to realize it's all a hoax and that Christmas Cacti apparently just bloom beautifully all by themselves (with a tiny human effort, perhaps!).