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| Peanut stacks in the field |
Peanut picking takes place in the fall when the peanuts are mature and ready to be plowed up and today they are mechanically picked and taken to the peanut warehouse to be dried. The peanut picking machine came along after I grew up and left home in the 1950's. I will explain how we harvested peanuts on our farm before modern times.
But I have to tell you that before the peanuts were harvested, we could pull up a few vines, pick the raw peanuts off the vines and boil them in a big black wash pot outdoors. A fire would be built under the pot to boil the peanuts. We would add a lot of table salt to the water to make the boiled peanuts salty to taste. Young people would be invited to a home for a peanut boiling and play party games while they waited for the peanuts to boil (cook). Peanut boilings were very popular in the 1940's and 1950's. Now people go to the grocery store and buy raw peanuts which are ready to be boiled. I think that's cheatin' a bit! Or better yet, they stop at a roadside stand and buy "boiled peanuts".
Let me begin at the beginning. Daddy would always save a basket of raw peanuts when he gathered them and in the winter, we would have peanut shellings. Families would get together and shell the peanuts and they would be packed away to be planted in March. This is where they got their seed. The peanuts were put into a planter and either planted with mules or later by using a tractor. Some fertilizer was included in the planter with the peanuts. It was the children's job to load the seed peanuts and fertilizer in the planters when they became empty. And to furnish the person doing the planting with water to drink. I always liked planting time because it was warm enough to go barefoot and walk in the soft plowed dirt. During our spare time we would build "frog houses" in the dirt and decorate them. More about games we played in the field in another blog. Maybe I'll build a frog house and take a photo of it so you can see what I am talking about. When the dirt was "broken" or plowed prior to being planted, and after a good rain, we would remove our shoes and go "bogging" to see who could make the largest holes in the ground. I can still feel the dirt squeezing between my toes. What fun!!
Once the peanuts started coming up and filling the rows with little green bushes, the weeds would also start coming up among them. We had to go to the field and "hoe" the peanuts, which meant digging up the grass and weeds and try not to dig up the young peanuts. I really didn't care for this part of the peanut farming. This usually took place in hot weather, June and July.
We would go to the field early in the morning after having had a big country breakfast. But by 10 AM, it would be so hot and humid. We would stop to have lunch at noon and rest a bit under the big pecan trees before heading back to the field around 1 PM. And we would work until the sun went down. We didn't have to work on Saturday or Sunday. Our friends liked to work on our farm with us because my dad would bring us cold drinks from the store and maybe a moon pie or candy bar. And at the end of the hoeing season, he would take us to Pond Creek to go swimming. He knew how to get us to work. We didn't receive any money for working as kids do today. And if he grew cotton, we had to chop the excess cotton plants and hoe the weeds just as we did for the peanuts. I'm glad he wasn't much of a cotton farmer. He preferred peanuts.
Ah, peanut picking time. A large plow was used to lift the peanuts out of the ground, with all the peanuts hanging underneath the vine. The peanuts were covered with soft dirt. The family got involved again and this time we walked behind the plow, lifted the peanut vines (little bushes) and shook the dirt off the peanuts, leaving the peanuts exposed to the sun. You can only imagine what a dirty job that was. Once the peanuts were shook, the men came to the field with a wagon load of poles and slats, and dug holes in the ground, put a tall pole in the hole and filled it with dirt, and then nailed two boards near the botton of the pole with the boards crossing near the pole, like an "x". Then the peanut vines were picked up with pitch forks and placed high on the poles like in the photo at the top of this page. The children would drag the peanuts to the poles for the workers to stack them. We were not allowed to use the dangerous pitch forks.
Once the peanuts were stacked and dried for about 4 weeks, they were ready to be picked. My daddy had the only peanut picker in the area and he kept busy for many weeks, picking his and most of his neighbor's peanuts. The peanuts were separated from the vines as they passed through the picker. The dried sweet vines were baled into square bales with a baling machine that was behind the picker. This hay was taken to the barn to fed to livestock during the winter.
Peanut picking took place in late September and there was always the danger of tropical storms and gales (that's what they called hurricanes back then). Neighbors helped each other and worked day and night if they thought there was going to be bad weather. We didn't have weather radios, TV or any way except the newspaper to know about weather.
After the peanuts were separated from the vines (picked), they were gathered in big tubs and then poured in the back of my daddy's big red truck, and taken to the warehouse to sell. He put the money in the bank and this was what we lived on until the next fall. He found lots of odd jobs to do throughout the year, including lots of bartering.
I have a great respect for peanut farmers and really appreciate peanut butter much more than those who have no idea all that goes into getting it in the grocery store. Of course we made our own peanut butter and peanut brittle.
If you want to learn more about picking peanuts, go to this link, to page 4. I found the photo used above of stacked peanuts on page 2 of this website: www.rootsweb.com/~ncbertie/peanut.htm
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