Peanut farming in New England

Last year, we finally had a garden at this house. Even though we moved in the fall of 2006, we just couldn't get going on a garden until the spring of 2008. It turned out that the soil left by the builders was not the nice loam that had been there. They charged us to haul that away and left us with sandy soil with lots of pebbles and stones. So, we had to buy some loam from the guy next door who runs a nursery and does landscaping. He gave us a really good price. We decided to make a raised bed garden because the thought of mixing that nice loam in with the horrible stuff in our yard was like putting cream and sugar into a glass of bath water and expecting it to taste good.

So, at the end of last year, our garden looked like the top picture. We let the kids pick out some flowers and one other plant to include in the garden. Emma picked a watermelon and Evan picked a peanut plant. I didn't think Evan's peanut plant would do well so far north but we were intrigued by the idea. The plant got nice and bushy and stayed green all summer. We forgot about it in the fall, though, and didn't dig up the roots to dry out the peanuts.

When I dug up the garden this week-end to prepare for this summer's garden, I found some peanuts still in the soil! The picture on the left shows Evan with one of them. Yes, it looks like he's grown a sixth finger so I included another picture of him holding it in his had so you can see how big it is. If only we had more faith in our one little peanut plant and treated it right after it had gone to all the trouble of growing such big peanuts. Maybe Evan will grow up to be President like another peanut farmer we know about.