On Peanuts and Books
One of the many reasons I
could never move away from the farm is that I can be misanthropic at
times and need absolute peoplelessness around me. This has been
one of those weeks, so today when Mark went over to help the neighbors
harvest the rest of the potatoes, I stayed home and finished off Diane
Setterfield's The Thirteenth
Tale (which is one of the best books I've read in months, though
I'm not sure if it would appeal to men.)
Having savored the last page, read every word of the acknowledgements,
and pored over the author's biography, I had to give up and re-enter
the real world. Luckily, there's always something that needs to
be done on the farm. I still haven't finished planting all of my
garlic, so I built and planted two more beds, then harvested the first
peanuts I've ever grown in my life.
For those of you who don't know, the nuts on peanuts start aboveground
as flowers, then burrow their way down into the dirt to develop into
underground fruits. Despite what some folks think, if your soil
is soft enough there's no need to mound dirt up around them --- I did
no mounding and my peanut plants produced very well. Now I have
to be patient and wait a few days for the nuts to dry since newly
harvested peanuts have a mild toxin in the nuts. Assuming the
flavor is good, I'll be adding peanuts to my usual crop roster --- they
were effortless to grow, survived relatively severe deer nibbling, and
were a breeze to harvest. Stay tuned in a few days for news of my
first attempt to make peanut butter!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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