Harvesting our first ever Peanut Crop!

Back in March, we posted This Post to show us planting a brand new crop in our garden: Peanuts. We had never planted them before.  We all love peanuts and wanted to try our hand at growing them. Bottom line: We achieved some success and will plan on definitely planting them again next Spring. This past week we harvested the peanuts and as with doing anything new, we learned some lessons that we'll employ next year and I'll discuss those a little later.

Here is one of the peanut plants and how it looked just prior to harvesting.

A peanut plant

We learned that peanuts aren't actually nuts, but are a legume.  While nuts grow on trees, peanuts grow underground.  Even before digging, when I scratched some hay mulch out from the base of the peanut, I saw a peanut and it looked ripe:

Our first peanut

I popped it open and we snacked on the fully developed peanuts.  They were good. Not as good as a boiled peanut or a parched peanut, but good nonetheless, right out of the ground.

Snack Time

Peanuts bloom a pretty yellow flower and once the peanuts bloom, they send a shoot or a "peg" into the ground and the peanut grows off of the peg.  If you look closely below you can see the peg that the freshly dug peanut is growing off of.

"Just-dug" Peanuts

After planting the peanuts, I Googled how long before they will be ready to harvest and the information I read said 120 days.  But it also said that the foliage of the peanut plants will begin to yellow and that is a sure sign that they are ready.  Well... we planted back in late March.  I kept checking and checking and checking and as you can tell from the first photograph, the foliage NEVER began to turn yellow.  We were well past 120 days and so I decided to dig them up.

Here's lesson #1 (at least in my very limited experience with peanut growing): Don't wait until the plants begin to turn yellow.  Begin digging up a few when the prescribed growing days have passed and crack a few open.  If the peanuts inside the shell are fully developed, they're ready.  Digging them up was easy.  I just loosened the soil all around the plant with a shovel (A digging fork might work better), grabbed the peanut plant at the base and gently pulled up out of the loosened soil.  The results can be seen above.

I think by waiting on the foliage to turn yellow, I hurt the yield as you can see that some of the peanuts had started sprouting:

Sprouting peanuts

Here's one that was sending a fantastic root structure right out of the shell.  Too bad we won't get to eat that one.

Healthy looking roots

We only planted one half of a row in our first crop which amounted to about 15 feet of peanuts.  I ran a string from our canoe (The Garfish) and hung the plants from the string.  I'll allow them to hang there and dry for a couple of weeks.

Hanging out to dry

Here is a nice picture of a group of peanuts.  It is an interesting crop to grow as it is different from anything we've tried before and we'll plant more of them next year.

Not too bad for our first try

Another lesson I learned is that peanuts do better with loosened soil or soil with lots of organic material in it.  Next year I'll plant them where the soil is the loosest and will continue to work in lots of compost, leaves, hay and other organic amendments to the soil.

We'll likely roast or parch these peanuts once they are dry.  I'll also save some of the seeds to plant a next year's crop.  We've already seen evidence that the germination is good and these are an heirloom, open-pollinated variety.  Maybe we'll even have a little leftover to make some peanut butter!