There are a few stories like this related to revival of the Carolina Rice Kitchen heritage cuisine in the book The Third Plate by chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Anson Mills [1] in particular come to mind in regard to the revival effort - they’re growing and selling Carolina Gold Rice, Graham Flour, Bennie seeds, etc, and I would not be surprised if they get involved in this peanut project as well.
I did too! Two years ago there was an article about Carolina Gold and I ordered from Anson Mills. I really enjoyed the aged/laurel brown rice. It has a deep fragrant flavor, great texture and was very good in baked rice dishes.
Good to hear I wasn't the only one lol. I found the Carolina Gold to be extremely rich? It's hard to describe high quality rice other than it stood out to me and I'm a Louisiana man who has eaten a fair share of rice.
Perhaps it had been built up by Third Plate and also the expectation that comes with Anson’s rather fussy recommended preparation but I failed to have my doors blown off by it. With that said, I regularly buy in bulk Anson’s rice waffle mix (incredible), graham flour (for biscuits), and oats (the best oatmeal).
That link says no to anywhere, looks like USDA zone 7 is the minimum for outdoor growing:
Peanuts have a long growing season and require 100 to 130 depending on the variety of frost-free days to reach maturity. USDA Zone 7 and above should plan on starting seeds for peanuts indoors 4-5 weeks before the last anticipated frost date. Zones 8 and above can start inside to get a head start, or sow directly into your garden beds after your last frost date.
If you're not a bit selective with your technique, region, or breed, tomatoes aren't de facto easy. Any winter I'm not careful enough I lose mine. Other people struggle in dry summers, wet summers, or other adverse conditions.
Peanuts are IMO similar. They require warm nights and a long growing season, so any northern or moutainous area will need _some_ extra considerations and can't rely on cold-weather breeds to paper over the problem. You might want a much longer stint indoors than other plants before tossing them in your garden. Like tomatoes, they're not crazy about excess moisture (and where tomatoes just die when they get fungal infections, there's a wide range of conditions where peanuts will still produce but the produce will be toxic). Otherwise they're pretty easy.
I assume that this is the direct son of another post a few days ago.
> Can peanuts grow pretty much anywhere in the U.S.?
desert plants, so most probably not in snow or frost areas
They are much better than strawberries for CA at least, but the winning strategy with water if you are a small farmer is not reducing its consume. This would benefit mainly your competitor companies that can use more water and push you off of the road at mid term. Is similar to the problem of not using a big server after having spent solid money building it. You are not saving money or energy, really, and your part of the cake is just reduced
Either everybody saves water at the same time, or is just big fishes trying to convince the small ones to surrender part of its quote so there are more resources for them
Brought to the port of Charleston in 1690 by African slaves, the re-emerged Carolina African Runner peanut is known as the first peanut planted in the American colonies.
Fascinating that a plant native to and very widely cultivated in South America made it to the American colonies by way of Africa. Were they not grown by indigenous peoples in the North?
According to Wikipedia it was available all the way North to at least Mexico since apparently that's where Europeans (Spanish conquistadors) encountered it.
One opinion is that it originated in either Brazil or Peru. Maybe the plants made it to Africa after the Europeans discovered America. Maybe they got to Africa by some other path.
I did some web searching after reading this but didn’t find an answer to my questions:
This particular cultivar was brought from Africa to North America and was considered “extinct” once it was no longer planted in North America. But what about Africa? Is it no longer grown in Africa? Why not?
That doesn't preclude this cultivar being African in origin. Could have made it to Africa in the 1500s, undergone selective breeding there, and returned to North American via the slave trade later. (See also: North American potatoes coming from Europe, not directly from the Andes.)
If you like smaller peanuts, find an Iranian trail mix shop and ask for 'tiny peanuts from Astaneh-ye Ashrafiyeh'. They've been selected for small size and taste.
What kind of place do you live where you can find a shop with such a niche on top of a niche? A trail mix shop doesn't exist in my city, let alone an Iranian one.
Indian grocery stores carry both small peanuts (Indian variety) and large peanuts (American variety). 4 lbs small peanuts cost about $5.99; 4 lbs large ones cost about $6.99
Probably yes. I got hold of some historical apple varieties. Historical as in 19th century. They’re good. Not as sweet as many today’s apples, but the taste is nice IMO.
I'd like to try one, but I'd limit my expectations.
My wife and I stumbled upon a local group selling heirloom tomato plants a couple of years ago. We grew a few and soon realized why they became heirlooms. The nicest thing that can be said is that they must be an acquired taste.
There isn’t one variety of heirloom. There are many. Personally, I like the purple ones. A deeper, smokier flavor. Also pineapple tomatoes are delicious sweet little treats with a subtle pineapple taste. Bakers creek/rare seed has a great catalogue. That said, we’ve had duds. Only have two growing seasons under my belt.
They're heirlooms because they worked really, really well for one family in one location for many years. But if you grow them in different conditions, you may get vary different results.
Tomatoe flavors are (in addition to variety) extremely sensitive to nutrients and growing condition. I've had Barrys Crazy Cherry be one of the best flavors ever one year, rich and lowacid and textured and sweet, and absolute watery cardboard the next year - from the same seed batch on a semipro scale.
Heirlooms are less consistent for sure. They can be more sensitive to their growing conditions too.
But IMO commodity tomatoes are some of the "easiest" things to improve upon. Regular supermarket tomatoes are often flavorless, the farmer's market tomatoes are often better (e.g. in California)
So heirlooms have higher highs and lower lows
IMO commodity tomatoes are consistent, but consistently "meh" ...
My experience is that contemporary varieties of tomatoes grown at home are much better than those grown by the big producers. I'm not sure why, but our tomatoes are always red all the way through. The ones from the store are often whiter and coarse-grained inside. Actually, the same thing happens with strawberries.
The tomatoes and strawberries you grow at home don’t need to hold up to long distance shipping. Not to mention, the mass market fruits and veg don’t have somebody personally motivated by getting something at the peak of ripeness.
Like most things, it’s a different set of priorities and incentives that drive different results.
Conventional wisdom says they've been bred for resiliency, predictable ripening, long lasting. Not flavor.
One clue is, the gene that ripens tomatoes is also the one that causes the skin to split. So the seeds get spread. But not useful for commercial use, as split tomatoes are worthless to sell. So they use varieties that don't express that gene. So they don't ripen much. So they are tasteless, no matter how long on the vine.
Definitely grow your own, if you care about tomatoes at all and have the room@!
Commercially grown tomatoes are harvested while they are hard and green, transported and stored in that state, artfically reddened by exposing to them to ethylene in a gas chamber, then presented for sale in the marketplace as "ripe."
Would you like to know how "Not From Concentrate" orange juice is manufactured? It may not be concentrated, but it involves many industrial processes and can be up to a year old when you buy it.
I'm someone who very much believes in home grown food whenever possible. I have a very large garden (larger than probably 80%+ of the country could even hope to have, thanks to living in the country) and I grow a very large proportion of all the vegetables I eat. So I'm someone who is sympathetic to your view.
But I can't disagree strongly enough with calling store-bought and/or industrialized food "fake".
It's different. It has different tradeoffs. It's worse in some ways (and better in others), but what it most definitely is not is "fake".
On the bright side, essentially everyone I know seems to like local produce, BEFORE I tell them it's local. Their taste buds are still attuned, and can tell the difference
“The Carolina African peanut is so tiny that when it runs through a shelling machine, only about 70% will make it into a pile of good seed, then the sheller has to throw the rest out,” Ward said.
(in this case the remainder isn't thrown out, but hand shelled).
Obviously that shelling machine is designed to process bigger peanuts. Would it be difficult to re-design it (or make adaptable) to handle smaller ones?
That would seem inevitable if this peanut becomes more popular. Hand shelling 30% of a peanut harvest, in 2024? Come on...
The knee-jerk reaction is to say “no, just make all the parts smaller.”, but at some point the peanut and the shell are the same weight and fragments of shell are the same dimensions as a single peanut. Throw in variation on both sides and it becomes a difficult problem most likely requiring a good optical recognition system.
Peanut oil is used pretty extensively in GA, the state, and I tend to love the flavor it imparts. I'm curious how it sits on the healthiness chart. My gut feeling is that it's somewhere above canola but below avocado.
What bothers me about canola oil is it is actually rape seed oil. Rape seed is/was originally toxic. I have heard two different stories on how this was overcome. 1) The toxicity was bred out by Canadians. 2) The toxicity is removed in a process invented in Canada. In either case Canadians are responsible and came up with the more marketable name. Imagine trying to sell rape oil.
I worked on a farm growing rape seed in Germany and once slept on the side of a rape seed field outside Malmo, Sweden on summer solstice night, a very short night.
I've also noticed a movement renaming to canola seed. Yeah, some people need a new name for everything.
There are 5 peanut proteins (Ara 1 1/2/3/5/8) that are associated with peanut allergies, with Ara h 1 being the most common (~90% of people with peanut allergies are allergic to h 1).
"Quantification of major peanut allergens Ara h 1 and
Ara h 2 in the peanut varieties Runner, Spanish, Virginia,
and Valencia, bred in different parts of the world"
concluded:
"The results suggest that peanuts of different varieties, and from different parts of the world contain similar proteins, including Ara h 1 and Ara h 2. Consequently, the IgE-binding properties are similar to a great extent. This indicates that differences in the serology of peanut allergy may not originate from differences in the allergen composition of the peanut."
I guess it's the RuneScape subreddit ? for some reasons it seems that Jaggex, the RS parent company have partenered with a third-party company, Peanuts, that sells things to players. And it's quite controversial.
They are nitrogen fixing like most legumes. There are small nodules their roots that harbor nitrogen producing organisms.
A few people in my community garden have grown a few smaller plants. I prefer planting snow peas early to give my summer plants a nitrogen boost.