Planting Peanuts

YUM! Peanut butter. PB and J sandwiches. Peanut butter cookies. Peanut butter is great in so many ways, but where does it come from? You probably know that it comes from ground up peanuts, but where do the peanuts come from? Peanuts are the seeds of peanut plants. A peanut plant produces flowers just like many plants around your house. Once the plant flowers, pollination occurs allowing the pollen from one part of the flower to come together with ova (like little eggs) from another part of the flower. They join together to form the seeds - or peanuts - of the plant. A peanut plant is rather unusual because after flowering, the stems where the seeds are beginning to grow bend down towards the ground and the peanuts actually develop underground. Check out a picture here: http://www.bhg.com/gardening/plant-dictionary/vegetable/peanut/ The peanuts are ready to harvest after about 3 months. These peanuts would not be tasty because they have not been roasted. The peanuts that we eat at baseball games and that are used in making peanut butter have been roasted bringing out their peanutty flavor and eliminating the "green" flavor of a raw peanut..

  You can grow your own peanut plant at home. Fill a plastic cup or pot with soil. Place the raw peanut, the shell and the nuts inside, about 2 inches beneath the top of the soil and cover the peanut with soil. Moisten the soil with 4 tablespoons of water. Keep the peanut planter in a warm area and remember to keep the soil moist. A peanut plant will emerge within a week and it can flower within few months.

-Growing a peanut plant is a great activity for homeschooling or the classroom. Many kids have planted seeds from a seed packet, but few have ever planted a seed bought from the produce department of their grocery store.

- Students can learn about seed anatomy as they study the peanuts before planting. A peanut plant is a dicotyledon.It has two parts in its seed as compared to a monocot, such as corn, that one has one part.

When a student separates the halves of a peanut, they will notice the small embryo tucked at one end and if they look very closely, they can even see to leaf-like sprouts popping out of it.

The majority of the peanut is actually food for the growing peanut plant and this is why it is also a good food source for containing  many unsaturated fats and proteins. If teacher or parent supervision is available, you can actually put a peanut on a pin and light it with a match just as you would light a candle. This is a clear indication of how much oil is in a single peanut.

-Like any seed planting activity, students can design different experiments to test the germination of peanut seeds. Here are a few suggestions:

  1. Try soaked in water peanuts versus non-soaked peanuts.

  2. Try peanuts in the shell versus peanuts not in the shell.

  3. Try different soil types for growing peanuts - clay, sand or potting soil.