Fastigata pin striped and Negrito Manduvi peanuts

[meizzwang]

In my micro climate here in Coastal Northern California, it's nearly impossible to grow peanuts here because the weather just doesn't get enough units of heat during the grow season. During the fall, We will regularly get a few days every year that reach a high of 100+ farenheit (38C+) but then after about the early to mid afternoon, the cool breeze from the ocean will kick in and it'll go down to the mid to low 70's (around 21C or so). It's such a unique microclimate! It's not quite coastal, but not quite inland, maybe a hybrid of the two! That means it's also really windy here, we're in a very powerful wind tunnel.

Our lack of heat units also means we can't grow Okra outdoors: I tried the previous season and after 5 months in the ground, the plants were just barely bigger than seedling sized! They NEVER grew before the frost arrived in October. Unless you get the right variety, we can barely grow eggplants/bell peppers but we can get away with growing corn, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, and many other summer crops. 10 minutes down the road, growers have no issues growing all of the heat loving summer veggies outdoors, their temperature is between 6-15F warmer than at my house!

So what do you do when you live in a climate that's too cold for peanuts but you want to grow them really bad and you have the will to try it out? Jimmy rig a hoop house! Let me tell you though, it's a huge learning curve to get the temperatures right in these little "mini-greenhouses": one day, you might have the sides opened up too much, and the next day when it's warmer, the sides won't be opened enough! It has to be fiddled with on a daily basis, it's a lot of work so not something you'd want to do unless you get a kick out of it!

I've tried growing peanuts before about 1 degree latitude south of my current latitude where it actually gets much warmer, and while I did succeed and getting peanuts, the plants barely grew to any decent size and the yield was very low. We also had pill bugs which destroyed the pin striped peanut flowers, so those didn't produce anything, I only had success with the Negrito Manduvi variety.

Fast forward 5 years later, I still have some of the original seed packets in cold storage, and they surprisingly still have near 100% germination! They are in their shell, that's probably helping a lot, along with keeping them very dry and cool the whole time. Being in California, it's nearly impossible to acquire a wide variety of peanuts to grow because of the State's very strict rules about bringing them in: CA is a huge agricultural state and can't afford to be introducing pests, pathogens, and diseases. Consequently, almost no seed company is willing to ship them here! I had acquired these seeds in person from a seed vendor and didn't realize at the time that it would probably be one of the few opportunity I'd get to try these varieties out!

They were germinated indoors under lights with a heat Matt and grew super fast/strong! After being hardened off outdoors, I planted them directly into the ground and surprisingly, despite tearing the roots up pretty bad, there was no wilting, they are quite tolerant of root disturbance at the seedling stage!

That said, It was very difficult to fine tune the exact right temperature for them: one day, the leaves would all be folded, and I had no idea why! Don't they like warm temperatures? turns out, they weren't yet established and the temperatures were too high for them, but just on that one day! I lifted up the side of the hoop house and the next day, the leaves were still folded. What the heck?!!! Turns out, it was too cold for them, so I lowered the sides that day and the leaves opened up. Bingo! This was a game of reading the plant and figuring out how to "rig" the sides of the hoop house on any given day. Folded leaves during the day=plant is mad, open leaves during the day=plant is happy! Keep in mind, the plant closes their leaves during the night and this is probably normal.

Anyways, about 2 weeks after planting them into the ground, I'm finally starting to see new growth emerging from the plants, so it seems as though this is working! I'm pretty confident that as long as I don't cook them, this grow setup will work!


here's a picture of Negrito Manduvi. The plants are relatively small but I'm sure they can get much bigger in warmer climates. They're actually quite vigorous, all things considered. I planted these very close to each other assuming it will be hard to size them up here even with a hoop house over them, I also wanted as much diversity as possible from the packet so I can do a seed increase and have more to plant in the future:


Here is the Fastigata pin stripped peanut (everything in the photo except the two rows to the right). These are quite vigorous and can form much larger plants, but I still packed them in there in the hopes of maintaining diversity. It wouldn't be too disappointing if these crossed with Negrito Manduvi:




A close up of one of the plants. The older leaves look a little bit "mad" but if you look at the new leaves emerging from the growth point, it appears they're acclimating well and maybe will have much better growth now that they're established:



I'll update this thread as the plants grow so stay tuned.....

[karstopography]

Nice, I had to look up those peanuts.

I skipped growing peanuts this summer. Our feed store was out about a month ago when I normally plant peanuts. Reifel’s typically has a big barrel of raw Spanish peanuts or Tennessee red Valencia peanuts in the shell by the door. Kevin Reifel said to his daughter, “why didn’t you tell me we were out of peanuts?”

I’ll probably regret not growing any. I put okra in the place where I was going to put the peanuts. Peanuts nor okra are challenged by our summer climate. We have our own maritime micro climate being about 20 kilometers from the Gulf of Mexico, but things are considerably warmer at nights in the summer and our sea breeze does knock down the temperatures, but nothing like the relatively cold Pacific Ocean can do.

Good luck!

[meizzwang]

quick update: it's only been 5 days since the last post, and the peanuts haven't grown much since then but they're looking very happy and are now fully established. To my surprise, a few of them have already started to flower!

[meizzwang]

some updates on the peanuts! Granted, we've had unusually warm weather this year, our night temperatures dip in the low 50's to high 40's even during the middle of summer, making it very difficult to grow warm loving veggies. For perspective, I started a 69 day corn on April 7th, and approximately 100 days later, it's still not ripe here!

For sure, without the hoop house, I don't think there's enough time in the grow season to finish these plants, and even with the hoop house, these peanuts are growing very slowly. That said, they appear to be thriving! My biggest concern was the lack of pegs: the plants have been flowering for at least a month and I haven't seen a single peg until today, one was finally spotted! Usually, it takes a supposed 7 days after the flowers are pollinated for peg formation to occur.

I still don't quite understand the anatomy of peanut reproduction. There's a flower and a flower stalk that emerges from a node. That flower blooms, self pollinates, and then dies off. 7 days later under normal conditions (which I don't have), from the node, a peg forms, and once it digs into the ground, it forms the peanut. I guess the ovary isn't in the flower like other legumes but instead the ovary is located in the node? Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in on that.


My only regret this grow season is not planting the entire packet out, I should have done that! Thing is, I also wanted to grow some soy beans, water spinach, and some luffa (see-gwa), the last two requires the hoop house in my cool climate whereas the soy reportedly can grow without it here. Space under the hoop is limited, which is why I opted to grow a variety of veggies rather than the whole thing packed with peanuts. If they work out this year, I will grow the entire hoop with peanuts next grow season, they're so fun to cultivate and are quite challenging here, which makes it more interesting.

some updated photos of the peanut plants, photos taken 7/18/24 . These were all started in early May 2024:

the darker green plants to the left ( bigger leaves) are fastigata pin stripped peanut, and to the right (smaller leaves, lighter green) is negrito manduvi. I'm surprised that the negrito manduvi plants are about the same size as the fastigata: they started off much smaller:



closer photo of negrito manduvi:


Overview shot, you can see the water spinach (Ipomoea aquatica) in the background. As an aside, I tried growing water spinach a few years ago without the hoop house, and after 150 days, got 2 harvests! You're supposed to get a harvest every 2 weeks with warm, tropical weather! This hoop house is for sure working, although we're getting a harvest probably every month rather than every 2 weeks, but I'll take that over 2 harvests total! Nobody within a 100 mile radius sells this stuff anyways, so growing is the only practical way to have access to these asian greens here:


Peanut flower! All of the plants have been constantly blooming for about a month now:


tons of spent flowers! At first, I thought the flower would fall off and the flower stem turned into the peg, but that's not the case, the entire flower and stem dries up after pollination. From the node that the flower emerged, that's where the peg forms, which then produces the peanut once it digs itself under the soil.

A lack of pegs after tons of flowers got me worried because all of the plants appear healthy and flowering, but not producing the pegs needed to produce peanuts. I tried google searching the issue and nothing came up, probably because nobody grows peanuts in cool, coastal climates! I think our cold nights really affect peg formation:


That said, here's a crappy picture of a peg, a sign that things will probably work out in the long haul, it just takes much longer than normal:

[meizzwang]

took some more pics of the pegs:


That brownish red "stem" looking thing is the peg:


These peanuts are thriving! In the foreground, there are some smaller plants: a few weeks after planting a gopher got in and took out some of the plants, but I trapped the gopher and put some replacements in. We're having a heatwave right now, so I have to keep the plastic open:


full sun from sun up till sunset. These are negrito manduvi, they're more vigorous than the pin striped fastigata peanut:

[meizzwang]

gophers have come in and forced me to harvest a few plants early unfortunatel: in one day, a single gopher killed 10 plants! Fortunately, I trapped him but he did take a few more plants out right before getting caught!

I'm also starting to see signs of botrytis: trying to grow peanuts in cool coastal California weather comes with its challenges. It also doesn't help that I planted them really close to each other, assuming the plants would stay small like they did in the past because it's just not warm enough. Having greenhouse plastic over them is an entirely different world and the plants are full sized, so now they're all jam packed together, creating the perfect habitat for pathogens.

some updated pics of the overall crop:


Every plant is pegging like crazy, but I don't think those will make it in time. We get our first frost in about a month and a half from now:


Peg just starting to form:


Fastigata pin striped peanut: I suppose this is significant success compared to my last attempt. Without greenhouse plastic, the plants stayed small and never grew much, and this variety produced ZERO peanuts after 6 months of being outside! With greenhouse plastic, the pegs that formed first have mature peanuts in them already:


and they look pretty unreal: