I’m not much of a farmer. But I am growing some stuff. Berries asparagus squash broccoli cauliflower beans peppers collard greens tomatoes basil and peanuts.

Peanuts?

One plant. I didn’t plant it. My crow buddy did, in the front yard. And I don’t actually know anything about harvesting it. Specifically, I do not know whether peanuts grow above or below ground. Which is basic.

Tons of modern people don’t know how vegetables grow. They don’t recognize my asparagus, they think potatoes pop out along vines. I like to feel sneery about these people, as though I were a font of ancestral lore, but I am not. And so it is that I do not know where to look for my peanuts if they show up.

It’s understandable. There’s nowhere in Oregon that is renowned for its peanuts. My initial thought was that the peanuts are underground, like potatoes. But I do know peanuts are legumes, like peas, and peas produce their pea goodness above ground. So, how do I know when to harvest my peanuts? Do I wait for them to pop out of the flowers, or just stare at the ground and wonder?

A nut, strictly speaking, is a fruit whose ovary wall becomes hard at maturity, which I think is unduly harsh. Things can get hard with maturity, which explains all the conservatives out there, but they don’t have to. Some things that start out hard get softer with enough maturity.

Well, the answer is that the peanuts do grow underground, which is a wacky way of reproducing shared by very few plants. They flower like a normal plant, pollinate themselves (whee!), and the fertilized ovary begins to enlarge. So far, normal. Then the ovary shoots out a little protruding peg (whee!) that penetrates the soil (whee!), and the peanut develops just underground. What the hell? It’s like the old days, when they sent you away if you got pregnant in high school. Anyway, you might get about forty peanuts out of one plant. Whee! I don’t expect to, but if mine flowers, I’m going to be on my hands and knees staring at it for days.

We learned all about George Washington Carver where I grew up in Virginia, which is peanut country. He was revered for inventing peanut butter and being an example of a Black person who made something of himself, though we certainly didn’t learn about any other Black people, and weren’t letting any such people in our schools at the time. I figured the peanut butter alone qualified GW for sainthood, but as it turns out he was a much more significantly awesome historical figure.

However, he did not invent peanut butter, only because it had already been developed by the Incas c. 950 BC, or nearly a thousand years before Jesus famously did not spread peanut butter on his matzah. My goodness, if J.C. had had loaves and fishes and peanut butter, Pontius Pilate would have given him a pass.

Back to George. Who did invent Peanut Worcestershire sauce.

He was born into slavery, was emancipated as a tot, snatched by slave raiders and repurchased by his original master, who raised him and educated him, and he was accepted at a college that rejected him once he showed up all Black and all, and rather than embarking on a career murdering white people in their beds like a normal person would, he got into a less picky Methodist college and studied botany. And was the first Black American to earn a science degree.

He was studying crop rotation, and also taught farmers how to use swamp mud instead of fertilizer, and feed acorns to pigs rather than expensive pig feed. All good stuff. By that time, the almighty King Cotton crop was petering out, resulting in smaller and smaller Levis, and that’s when he came around and pointed out if they rotated in a peanut crop to fix nitrogen in the soil, everyone would be better off. It worked. The cotton came back strong but nobody like the piles of peanuts which did not spontaneously become peanut butter but, instead, rotted in place. Enter GW again to come up with a few thousand other things one could do with peanuts.

Check this out. He invented over 300 things but patented only three. He thought the fruits of his labor, hard-shelled or no, should be shared widely in the world. The man was far better human even than I had imagined as a child and deserves to be celebrated.

Let’s hope he doesn’t get canceled posthumously for killing modern children with allergies.

Update: no peanuts. My plant flowered, but the flowers looked around and said “What are we doing in freakin’ Oregon?” and folded right up.