Gardening with Wilson

I have contributed another article to the Home Concepts magazine. In the September 08 issue, I wrote on growing the peanut plant that is both an edible and fun to grow plant at home. All my earlier contributions focussed mainly on ornamental plants and I thought it would be a refreshing topic for readers if I were to write on something that one can harvest, enjoy and eat.

 To grow the peanut plant, one can simply buy raw peanuts seeds that are sold at our local wet markets and supermarkets which are normally bought to make desserts. Do not used salted or sugared peanuts that are sold at snacks as they have been killed by the roasting process! Germination rates of raw peanut seeds bought from the market may be poor, probably due to prolonged storage time and one just has to keep sowing the stock of seeds that has been bought until a good number of seedlings have been obtained.

The peanut plant is a tidy little bush featuring lush green foliage and I have started to grow them since young and they never been able to bore me.

One of the interesting things to watch what a peanut plant does is when the night time approaches and daylight has started to diminish, plants can been seen to fold their leaves as if they are going to sleep.

In addition, do you know that the peanut is perhaps the only common legume that has its fruit development process all taking place underground? After the small, dainty, bright yellow flower fade, a peg is formed at the end of a long stalk which elongates and bury itself underground!