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By Walker Elliott Rowe
Special to the Rappahannock News
Now that spring is officially here, it’s time to think about your garden. This year you might consider planting peanuts and boiling them. If you don’t know about the pleasures of eating salted, boiled peanuts then this article is for you.
When I was a kid in South Carolina we ate boiled peanuts by the pound and watermelon in its entirety, not by the slice.
So I was less than pleased when I moved 15 years ago to Bethesda, \ld.,where you cannot find boiled peanuts. In Baltimore, they roast peanuts at Camden yards, dry, dusty, perhaps even burnt remnants of what was once a great fruit.
I moved to Rappahannock a few years ago where there is definitely a dearth of boiled peanuts in this area.
Last year 1 ordered eight ounces of peanut seed from Burpee, the famous seed company. Then I used a tractor to scoop up a few hundred pounds of sand from the banks of the Thornton River and added this to my garden. I planted the peanuts in rows and used Miracle Grow fertilizer plus lots of water.
The results I got were fantastic. I harvested two 50 foot long rows and about 50 pounds of jumbo Virginia peanuts.
I asked Kenner Love, the county agriculture extension agent for our area, if anyone else is growing peanuts here.
“No one that I am aware of," he sard. He also said that peanuts generally do not need nitrogen and he questioned my practice of adding sand to the soil.
“Generally, sand cannot be added in sufficient quantities to alter the overall characteristics of the soil,” he said.
As to the question of whether he had eaten a boiled peanut, Love said “no." I must remember to send him a bag.
Peanuts are an important crop for Virginia agriculture says associate professor and agriculture economist Jim Pease of Virginia Tech.
“Peanuts are indeed a very important crop in the eight counties of Dinwiddie, Greensville. Isle of Wight, Prince George, Southampton, Surry, Sussex, the city of Suffolk, and in the Commonwealth as a whole," he said.
“In 2001, approximately 75,000 acres of peanuts were harvested, with cash receipts of nearly $59 million. Peanuts were the fourth highest crop in 2001 in terms of cash receipts, even though they are grown only in a few
76.5%