Grocery store gifts: sweet potatoes and peanuts

It's harvest time!

Sometime in July I planted sweet potato slips grown from a store-bought potato, as well as some peanuts, from a grocery store bag as well. The sweet potato harvest in a picture below is just from one slip; and that's what you should expect usually, six to ten potatoes from one slip. Sweet potatoes are pretty undemanding, they will grow in slightly fertilized sand, in fact these grew in just that, very poor sandy soil.

Peanuts do not demand awesome soil either, as a member of legume family they fix their own nitrogen. The harvest in this picture is just from one peanut. Not a bad outcome, somewhere from ten to twenty peanuts from one. I imagine, if I plant a pound of peanuts next year, I will have twenty pounds harvest, that will make a huge bag.

I tasted one peanut and it was still quite raw. The kernels should be somewhat darker in color; and the plant leaves themselves should turn yellow or light brown, indicating that the "children" are taking in the nutrients. I will give them another month, after that I will take another sample. Peanuts are an indeterminate vegetable, so we cannot count on a 100% maturity; as long as most of the peanuts mature the harvest should be deemed as a success.

The beauty of a garden is that once you grow something, it will always be there. I have tons of volunteer tomatoes, peppers, dill and bok choy. Sweet potatoes and peanuts are self-propagating as well. Since it is impossible to dig out every little root, they will continue giving for the seasons to come.

Update on growing peanuts

I had these peanuts from a grocery store growing since June, and now they started to flower. Peanuts take a long time to grow and that is why it is important to seed them at the right time so they would have adequate amount of warm weather to develop and fruit. Pictured below is a peanut plant flowering:

Here's my peanut patch, of maybe six to ten peanut plants. The orange flowers are cosmos, not peanuts. Cosmos seeded itself and I let it be for the beauty and pollinator attracting ability.

Peanut plant is supposed to bury their "children" into the ground. So far I am not observing that behavior, but will keep an eye on them and will report on the progress.

Grow peanuts from a grocery store bag

It's been just a week since I seeded some peanuts from a grocery store bag. They all have germinated. Granted, you will not always have a successfull guerrilla planting like that, but most of the time seeds saved from your regular vegetables will germinate and grow well. I planted four peanuts in Styrofoam cups as an experiment with growing grocery store peanuts. In this picture you can see that something else came up along with peanuts, it looks like a squash, maybe a sunflower. The reason for that is that I reuse my potting soil, so there could have been some seeds leftover from previous plantings. I will let this seedling grow and see what develops of it.

Now, usually, as in with tomatoes or peppers, I will let seedlings to get their first set of true leaves. I will not do that with peanuts because they have long roots, so keeping them in cups for too long will detriment their growth. So, the day peanuts germinated, they are put into the garden.

Usually, I would seed legumes directly into the garden, but this was an experiment and I wanted to see controlled germination. It worked, so now I know that I can safely plant peanuts from the grocery store directly into the garden.

Let's grow some peanuts

I always wanted to try growing some peanuts, even ordered the seeds a couple of years ago, but never got around to it. Recently I bought a bag of peanuts in the store and decided to try some out. For the peanuts to be "germinatable" they need to be raw, not roasted or processed in any way. Here's some raw peanuts from the bag, shelled:

I got some sixteen ounce Styrofoam cups, filled them with moistened potting mix to about two-thirds and placed peanuts on top:

Then covered with soil and watered:

Now I have to wait a week, maybe a couple of weeks for the peanuts to come up, while keeping the soil moist of course. Really, that's all to it.

When it comes to seeding, I do not obsess with it. Trust me, I used to, but not anymore. Nature will take care of it's children, and the children, aka seeds, are very resilient. I have volunteers in my garden all over the place. Whenever you leave a fruit on the ground, like a tomato or some Marigold heads, or radish pods, or been pods, etc. - they will seed themselves, it is inevitable. The only thing to pay attention to when it comes to seeding, is seeding in season and in conditions close to those of natural growing conditions.

Take these peanuts for example, naturally they should be seeded deeper than you would seed a tomato because peanut fruit is buried in the ground, and tomatoes simply fall on the ground. If in doubt, think how a plant would germinate in nature and try to imitate it. That's it. Happy seeding!