Have you ever thought about growing peanuts? this legume it is easy to grow in the garden and you can also keep it in a jar if you want. Certainly, the American peanut plant so loved by Super Goofy in the comics will never cease to amaze adults and children when they see the extraordinary harvest that peanuts give in the country.
Peanuts are a good crop to keep in the home garden – you can roast them and eat them as a snack or even mix them to make some delicious homemade peanut butter . This nut is also known as American peanut or ground pistachio, although it has nothing to do with pistachio.
Freshly picked peanuts, photos by Antonio Tocco.
Although in the past they were also widely grown in Italy, today peanuts are mainly spreading abroad, in Third World countries. In particular, in professional agriculture, they are kept to produce seed oil. Peanut plants resemble chickpeas, reaching a height of about 30 cm.
Like all legumes, peanuts also take nitrogen from the atmosphere and fix it in the soil, enriching it, making it an excellent plant to include in a synergistic rotation of vegetable crops.
Contents [Ocultar]
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The perfect soil for peanuts
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plant peanuts
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How to Grow American Peanuts
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Picking peanuts in the garden
Contents
The perfect soil for peanuts
soil and climate. Peanuts require fairly loose, medium-textured soil that does not create waterlogging. It likes heat and exposure to the sun, it should not fall below 15 degrees Celsius, which is why it is grown from spring and it can be useful to cover it with a non-woven fabric.
Another factor that could endanger the life of our “peanut” is the climate: the peanut likes temperate zones and mild climates. It fears temperatures below 16°C, so it will have to be sown in the spring, when you will see that the night temperatures do not drop too much, or you have to think about covering it with non-woven fabric. If you want to anticipate its culture, you can sow it in the nursery indoors at the end of winter and then transplant it outdoors when the season allows it and it has stabilized. We choose a sunny groundnut area that is protected from cold winds.
peanut seed
Peanuts are planted by placing the seeds in the ground. Obviously roasted seeds are not used bought in grocery stores, the seed is buried with its reddish film intact. Is considered a distance of 15 cm between the plants , between one row and the other it is better to leave in place at least 40 cm. To anticipate the harvest, if necessary, it can be sown in jars in protected culture in February and then transplanted in March/April in the garden.
Where to find peanut seeds . Peanut seed is peanut itself, even online you can buy organic peanut seeds, often organic seeds are out of stock, otherwise these peanut seeds are also good.
rows of peanut plants
How to Grow American Peanuts
The groundnut is a plant with a really particular development: it emits yellow flowers in clusters (called clusters) which, once fertilized, bend while bending, sinking under the ground, giving life to the pod with the seeds of 7-8 cm deep. , these are the peanuts that will have to be dug during the harvest. To speed up the process, you can tamp the plant at the end of flowering, making sure that pollination has already taken place.
Peanut cultivation is quite simple is a fairly hardy plant and in addition to tamping down and watering properly, it is enough to do some weeding to control weeds and check for possible aphid attacks.
Irrigation . Peanuts tolerate drought quite well, but for a good harvest they require frequent watering, it is better to water often without exaggerating the quantities than to create stagnation with constant watering. During the ripening phase, irrigation is suspended, also to prevent our peanuts from rotting.
Adversity : Peanuts fear cryptogamic diseases, they are prevented by working the soil correctly to avoid stagnation of water near the plant. As a parasite, it is attacked by aphids (the black legume aphid) and the red spider mite, it can defend the crop with natural methods such as nettle maceration and garlic maceration.
Picking peanuts in the garden
Collection. Peanuts are harvested in September/October when the seeds ripen. Sowing takes 100/130 days, generally by sowing in April we harvest in September, if we sow in May we hope to have our peanuts in October. A sign that the seeds are ready is the yellowing of the larger leaves. To harvest them, we pull the plants out of the ground, exposing the pods with the seeds that are underneath the plant.
Grill and use. Peanuts should be dried or roasted at low temperature. By mixing the roasted peanuts you get a cream, which can be made softer and more spreadable by adding oil, this is the delicious peanut butter, to try spreading it on bread or combining it with bananas.