Peanut Harvest

Eugene decided this was the year to plant and grow peanuts so he bought 2 pounds of seed (raw) peanuts and planted 1.5 rows of them in the bottom area back in late May. Yesterday we dug them up along with a lot of big grubs (which will become fish bait) and brought them up to the barn to cure for the next 3 to 6 weeks. It was interesting harvesting the plants. Many were still flowering and developing more pegs that will eventually become peanuts. many plants had scant few peanuts at all and others were loaded. We found that grubs like peanuts, perhaps more than potatoes as we found a lot of grub eaten peanuts along side potatoes that had older grub damage but very little new damage.

Peanuts are easy to harvest. All they need is a spud fork to gently lift them than a gentle shake to get the soil off and they are pretty much ready to by cured.

Big pile o' peanuts

A close up of the pegs (peanuts)

The peanuts are not big like they would be if they were grown further south but if we can get them to cure without molding they should be really good boiled or roasted.

Right now they are sitting in a big pile on an old screen door in the barn. The plan is to gather them up into groups of 3 to 5 , tie the plants together and hang them up somewhere in the barn to continue curing. Kind of like what we do with garlic. It would be easier to lay them out on other screens but at the moment we have onions finishing up their curing (most are done) and lots of potatoes curing where we have removed and cleaned up the onions. So those screen are occupied for the next 3 to 6 weeks.