Last year's crop yield was disappointing due to me waiting way too long to harvest. I got some bad information that told me to wait for the leaves to turn yellow. I followed those directions dutifully, but the leaves never turned yellow. When I finally dug them up, many had sprouted inside the shell. I researched a little more and found that you are supposed to harvest one plant at 110 days after planting and check to see if they are ripe.
Once the prescribed 110 day growth period was up, I dug up one of the plants and the peanuts were not ripe yet. I attributed this to a very, very dry June-July. The information said to give an additional 2 week growing period and try again. In two weeks we did it again and although the peanuts were larger, I figured we'd give it another two weeks. Here is our peanut patch - two 15 foot rows of peanuts:
This picture shows how the peanuts are formed. A peg drops into the ground with a peanut growing on the end of it.
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| Peanut at the end of a peg |
Benjamin once again helped me harvest the peanuts. I loosened the ground around the base of the plant with a shovel, and Benjamin gently lifted the plant from the ground, shaking the loose soil from the roots.
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| Not bad! |
With one of the two rows completely harvested, we had already far more peanuts than last year's crop! Benjamin was happy. He determined that we would roast (or parch) half of our crop and make peanut butter with the remaining half.
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| Halfway done! |
Although the yield was better, that's not to say it was perfect. As you can see in the palm of my hand below, we still had some peanuts that were over-ripe and had sprouted in the shell and were growing new plants. I still consider myself a novice peanut grower. I think we can improve our peanut growing more, but it seems that since peanuts are maturing at different rates, you are always going to have this problem to some extent.
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| We didn't get to this one soon enough |
Once harvested, we carried the peanuts into the garage and hung them, peanuts on top, from the Garfish (our canoe). We will allow them to dry for 2 to 3 weeks. The weather is getting less and less humid by the day, so they ought to be dried out nicely by mid-October.
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| A "Boatload" of peanuts |
We tried to eat one just right out of the shell raw. Not too good, to be honest. We'll wait until they are dry and roast them and THEN eat them. They won't last long.
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| 2015 Peanut Crop Drying |
| Our 2015 Peanut Crop: We approve and so does this guy!: |
| Image Credit |
We'll show you the next step in this process in three weeks or so...
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