Curing/Drying Our Peanut Harvest

We talked about harvesting our first ever peanut crop in This Post.  Once Benjamin and I harvested our peanut crop, we did pop a couple out of the shell and eat them, but to really do them right, you gotta dry them.  I brought them in the garage and ran a rope from one end of our canoe to the other and hung the entire peanut plant with peanuts facing up, from the rope.  We allowed them to dry for about 3 weeks. You could tell that they were ready because the leaves of the plant got dry and crumbly.

Drying the Peanuts

I popped the peanuts off of the peg (or shoot) that the peanut grew on.  As we explained in the blog post about the harvest, we waited much too long to harvest our peanuts and a bunch of them sprouted in the shell and we lost them.  But we still have enough to eat.  Here is a handful of the freshly dried peanuts.

"Give me some peanuts and cracker jacks..."

All in all we only had 6 peanut plants, so our peanut harvest was very skimpy.  Any knowledgeable peanut farmer would laugh at our little bucket of peanuts, but this was a first for us and we're definitely going to try it again.

The entire peanut harvest

Once I ensured that there were no more peanuts clinging to the plant, I piled what remained up and brought the plants out to the compost pile.

Off to the compost pile

So our big dilemma was what to do with our peanuts?  Roast them? Boil them? Make homemade peanut butter?  Or save them for seed to replant peanuts this Spring?  We haven't made up our minds yet, but we'll definitely show you whatever we decide to do with them.  My vote is to make peanut butter.