The botanist has gone farther than we have in tracing the peanut to its original home. How did it come into Virginia, and when? The records say it was the chief food supplied on "slavers" to the natives of Africa on their way to America, and the auction block where they were offered for sale. So the peanut and the negro came together from Africa in early colonial days. We have already mentioned India, Africa, and Spain as countries that export the nuts. Brazil is con sidered the original home of the peanut, because a half dozen species of the genus grow wild in that great region. Taking the botanist's word for it, we recognize in the humble "ground-nut," a cos mopolite, whose travels have satisfied it that North America is a good country to settle in.
The most interesting thing about the peanut plant is the way the blossoms look and act. The foliage is thick, but the leaves do not conceal the showy, yellow flowers that fade, one after another, and do not bear a single seed! The flowers that "mean business" are almost too small to see at all. They do not open, and have no showy color. As soon as they are fully grown they tuck their pointed tips into the ground, and work out of sight. Unless they do this the nuts will not de velop and ripen.
When the autumn comes, the plant is still flowering, and the grower hates to pull up a plant that has not finished bearing. But he does it. The late flowers form small nuts at best, and it is dangerous to take chances of an early frost that will damage the vines and interfere with the cur ing of the nuts.
A furrow is plowed to throw the earth away from the row on each side, and the plants are then lifted with forks, and the dirt shaken off the clustered nuts massed among the roots. Long
windrows of the loaded plants are gathered up by gangs of harvesters, and shocked around poles set firmly in the ground. The nuts are faced inward, so that they are protected by the tops, and a cap of grass roofs them from the rain. When dried the nuts are picked by hand or threshed out by machinery, cleaned of sand and rubbish, bleached, if they are discolored, and sent to market.
The chemist has told farmers some startling things about the peanut. They are full of meaning and interest to us all. It would pay to grow pea nuts even if we never harvested the nuts, because the plant is one of those nitrogen-gatherers, which absorbs that most valuable of all plant foods, nitrogen, from the air that is in the soil, and stores it in nodules on the roots, and in the stems and leaves. Plowing under such a crop adds to the soil the best possible green manure. After the nuts are taken off the dry plants are as rich stock food as clover hay. The hulls of the nuts are better than coarse hay. The cake left after press ing the oil out of the nuts is as good for fattening stock as cottonseed meal and linseed meal. It has three times the richness of corn. All kinds of stock like the taste of peanuts, and thrive on the food, green or dry.
The farmer has every reason to bless the slave trader who imported the peanut, for it brings mill ions of dollars to his pocket every year, and the refuse feeds his stock, which makes it, indirectly, a money crop. The elements of nitrogen, phos phoric acid, and potash, in which the plant is rich, finally go back to the soil in the barnyard manure, thus saving money which would otherwise have to be spent for other fertilizers.