Hello my fellow gardening enthusiasts. It's been a while since my last garden-related post and a lot has happened in the last 2 months after hurricane Irma came through.
My front hydroponics garden that I wrote about back in August was damaged enough that it has been turned off with nothing growing in it until I get a chance to rebuild a new system. I plan on getting to that a little bit later in December.
However, the peanut plant I have growing in a container out front has been doing well. You may remember that was started by a squirrel burying a raw peanut in my garden months back. Based on what I read online about growing peanuts I figured it was time to take a look and see if anything has come from it all.
About two months ago the plants started to put out little yellow flowers and drop pegs down into the soil that look like hanging 'roots' coming off the stems. To be clear, they are not actually roots, but they do grow down into the soil and create a node at tips that later form the peanut.
I figured after almost 4 months, they must be close to harvest time. I carefully removed the top layer of clay pebbles to expose the soil and found that many of the pegs started to form peanuts in the upper layer and did not continue down into the soil.
I started to gently loosen the soil around the roots and pull the plant up. What I found was many young peanuts still in the early stages of development, but no mature pods ready for harvesting. I remember from back when the plant first spouted that it was very buried very shallow in the pot by the squirrel, so this may not have given the plant the proper rooting it needed to grow.
I counted 18 pegs with peanuts developing, and 11 pegs that had not started to develop yet.
With this, I made the decision to re-pot the plant deeper in the pot and make sure all the pegs were properly buried. i then replaced the top layer of clay pebbles to discourage any critters from digging in the pot.
I will let the plant grow for another 30-45 days and check back in on it in early January to see what develops.
I am pretty sure if I decide to grow more peanuts next year (which I think I want to do) I will need to buy larger pots to grow them in to make sure they have plenty of space to drop the pegs to get a higher yield.
Let me know what you think, please leave your comments below.
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