22 July 2023
The “feels like” temperature hit 107°F just now. It’s a good thing I got everything outside done earlier this morning. I managed 1.3 miles on my walk and cleaned up some fallen debris from the Bismarck Palm just in time for my neighbor Trevor to mow my yard. Couldn’t have timed it better!
Today, like throughout much of the south of my youth, is wash day. As I stripped the bed, I noticed a few spots of blood on both the bottom and top sheets. I’m surprised they haven’t run red with blood but the drain doesn’t leak on the bulb end and I think those few spots are where the insertion point of the drain occurs. Thank goodness for Spray and Wash and learning at an early age that hot water sets blood stains. All it took was a little rinsing after the Spray and Wash under the cold water tap.
I think I learned the cold water trick from my mother but it could have been from Hints from Heloise. Remember that newspaper column? I was a religious reader of her’s for years. Apparently her daughter continues the tradition.
Life is full of little lessons if you pay attention. For example, my brother Archie taught me not to stick my finger in a plugged in empty Christmas tree bulb socket by convincing me it was OK and nothing would happen. One and done on that episode.
Years later I got back at him when we went out in his bass boat and he explained to me the trolling motor didn’t work correctly. Forward was reverse and reverse was forward. It took some arguing but I finally convinced him to reverse the battery poles. Voilà! It now worked correctly. He had bought the motor second hand and someone had wired it backwards as far as the poles are concerned. I love telling this story!
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Several years ago, I was walking Rocky along Riverland and noticed something blooming besides the sidewalk. The botanist in me immediately honed in on it and I immediately tagged it as belonging to the bean family of plants, the Fabaceae (or Leguminosae). I wasn’t too interested after that. That family of plants drove me crazy as a botany student. Wikipedia puts the number of genera at 765 and the number of species at over 20,000. It’s probably the third largest family of plants on earth behind the aster family and the orchid family.
My casual look and casual dismissal stuck in my mind for a little while on my walk and on my return trip, I paused for a second look. It was then I noticed that the plant had leaflets in fours. That’s atypical of the family. A lot of members of this family has three leaflets and others have multiples of leaflets but four is very unusual. It had a deep yellow bloom with a prominent banner petal and keel and less noticeable wing petals typical of the family.
The unusual four leaflets and bright yellow flowers kept nagging me and I knew I had seen it somewhere before.
💡! It was peanuts! The commercially grown peanut is the species Arachis hypogea and is a native of South America. The peanut I saw on my walk is the perennial peanut Arachis glabrata and is quite commonly found as a ground cover in peoples’ yards in South Florida. There are about 70 species of the genus Arachis.
Later in life I learned that when you plant peanuts, the flower is ephemeral, often lasting only one day. If fertilized (self or pollination by bees or insects), the petals drop off and the base of the ovary elongates and pushes the ovary underground (geocarpy). The peanut develops underground (thus the specific epithet hypogea.
My Grandad grew peanuts but before I knew what they were, I would play in his barn loft. The barn seemed massive to me at the time but it was probably pretty ordinary albeit a perfect place for a kid to play. I knew he stored hay in the loft for cattle and while relaxing one day on one of the bales, I noticed something lying atop the bale. I noticed these little growths at the base and being a curious kid, I broke one off and it popped apart in my hand to show me some seeds. I ate them and decided that was the best tasting hay I ever had.
After excitingly telling my Grandad about his good tasting hay, he laughed and said they were peanuts. After harvesting them, he put them in the loft of the barn to dry out for parching in the fall and winter.
That spring, he planted more and showed me the plants growing and later that year I helped (probably got in his way) and pulled them from the ground. I was amazed the peanuts were formed underground. By the way, you don’t just yank the plant out of the ground. You dig around it and carefully pull it away from the soil. Later you wash any soil particles away from the peanuts and then either pick them off to boil them or put them away to dry.
Like many members of the Fabaceae, peanut roots have nodules attached that contain nitrifying bacteria. You learned in high school physics that the earth’s atmosphere is 78% nitrogen which is in the diatomic form (N2) which means it’s chemically inert and doesn’t react with anything. Most living things need nitrogen in some form but cannot convert atmospheric nitrogen into anything else useful. Plants need usable forms as nitrates (NO3–) and nitrites (NO2–). The nodules contain a symbiotic bacteria that can remove atmospheric nitrogen from the air and convert it to nitrates and nitrites.
The peanut is almost a perfect food full of nutrition. Sadly, some people are allergic. I’m pretty much a purist when it comes to peanuts. My favorite form is boiled peanuts which you make from the fresh pull of plants from the ground. You don’t dry them out to make boiled peanuts. The trick is to add lots of salt to the water in which you are boiling, let them boil for about 30 minutes and then simply let them sit for an hour or two so they can absorb the salt. I can eat my weight in boiled peanuts.
Second on my preference list is parched peanuts. What I do is buy the raw ones and put on a sheet pan and bake them at 350°F for about 15 minutes. Then I turn the oven off and let them sit until I begin to smell them.
The peanut is technically an indehiscent legume. A legume is a specific type of fruit that is dry (as opposed to fleshy – like a apple) and develops from a single carpel (chamber of an ovary). Indehiscent means it doesn’t split open at the seams. An example of a dehiscent legume is the butterbean for those of you who have shelled them. Better yet, if you let butterbeans become dry, the legume pops open on its own. Since peanuts are indehiscent, they make you work to get to the goodness. Not that shelling butterbeans isn’t work in its own right.
A 100 gram serving of peanuts can provide 570 kcal of energy (Wikipedia). One lab experiment we used to do was to stick a peanut on a pin and then stick the pin into some sort of support and ignite the peanut. I would burn brightly for quite a while. The more technical way would be to ignite a peanut in a bomb calorimeter and measure the energy given off but it was more dramatic simply setting it alight and watching it burn.
Enough of the botany and science lesson.
Stay tuned!
