My friend, Sidney, gave me some corn and peanut seeds early this spring. I couldn’t find any room for the corn. Trust me, I tried. I even started some seeds in an egg carton while I was trying to find a place to plant the corn.
I started the peanuts in a Ziplock bag and transplanted them into a pot.
In mid summer I decided I wanted to use the pot for something else and dumped the plants onto the ground because they didn’t look like they were growing so well. But after I dumped them and saw they had pretty good roots I decided to put a couple of the plants back in the pot and I covered the roots of the ones I had dumped out on the ground.
So, here’s my peanut harvest from about four plants.
Here are a few peanut facts:
- The seeds can be grown from grocery store raw peanuts.
- The soil Ph should be about 6.0.
- The soil should be light and fluffy and contain lots of organic matter.
- The seeds germinate in 3 to 7 days and start flowering with bright yellow flowers in 30 to 40 days.
- After the plant flowers, pegs are sent down into the ground where the pods form.
- The plant blooms over a long period which means the individual pods mature at different times.
- The soil should not be allowed to dry out after the plant starts flowering. It results in lower yields.
- The pods mature in 120 to 140 days after flowering.
Now here’s what I did (or more appropriately didn’t do). I have never checked my soil Ph. I dumped the plants under a tree, so no light and fluffy soil there except the few inches of soil that got dumped out with the plant. My seeds did germinate pretty quickly. I got only one yellow flower between all the plants. The plants under the tree routinely dried out. It’s a miracle that any peanuts grew on these plants at all. I totally ignored the plants…no compost, no fertilizer of any kind.
I think this could be a nice plant to grow in an edible lawn situation because of its compact bushy growth habit, and I’m sure if the plants are treated better than I treated mine the harvest would be better. They also should grow well in a self-watering container because of the benefit of the extra warmth in the root area and the constant moisture.
I think this would be an interesting plant for kids too. Imagine the look on their faces when they dig and find a buried treasure of peanuts.
Happy Gardening!!!!
And because this is my first year with the self-watering containers, I’m still experimenting with what will grow how well in the SWCs and I’m mixing a little this with a little that.
I really don’t expect them to get much bigger because both vines are starting to shrivel up.
