Life on the Farm: Digging the peanuts, sweet potatoes and finally, the rain

I went and dug up my peanut crop on Thursday morning. Lame, lame, lame. Faulty management on my part. Got enough to boil and roast for ourselves but it would have been much more economical to have gone to Food Lion and bought 10 pounds of peanuts. But being hard-headed, I had to follow through the completion on the task I started last May.

Pulling up peanut plants by hand is in no way profitable. But eating freshly dug peanuts seconds out of the soil is something you can not buy anywhere. ...

After getting up the peanuts, I test-dug a 1-foot section of my 230 feet of sweet potatoes and pulled up a huge honker of a sweet potato. I decided I needed to dig them. I bush hogged off the tops and then plowed out the rows. Got mostly small to medium sweet potatoes. One of the top 5 biggest ones was the one I randomly dug by hand. ...

Got all that done by lunch. I had not sown any fall stuff yet except in seedling flats because it has been so dry, but with the forecast of rain, I tilled up a section and hilled it up into raised beds.

The plan was to rake and smooth the beds, sow seeds and then rake them in. I did that with the first bed and wrote down what I had planted where. Then it started to rain. I started broadcasting seed by hand as hard and fast as I could go: kale, beets, spinach, cabbage, carrots, radishes, kohlrabi, rutabaga, turnips, etc. Emptying seed packages like a mad man. ...

It was very liberating. I have always been very particular about row spacing and in-row spacing. We will see how it works out.

This story was originally published September 29, 2015 at 8:51 AM with the headline "Life on the Farm: Digging the peanuts, sweet potatoes and finally, the rain."