Goober Pyle of the Andy Griffith Show might be proud to know this, as would Snoopy for his namesake cartoon, but Keyhole Farm this season embarked on something new — to determine if peanuts could be raised in a keyhole garden. Now, everyone knows that a peanut is not actually a nut, but a legume similar to a bean except it prefers to hibernate underground.

At one time they were called things like earth-nut, Pindar nut, ground bean, Gouber pea, and ground nut. I planted them in the same patch of keyhole as my carrots, in an area of soil to which I blended some sand. I was attempting to put few clump barriers under the surface so that the carrots might not run into an obstacle as they deeply pierced the earth.

I am not sure that raising peanuts in a keyhole garden could be profitable, but mainly I wanted to just see if it they would grow there, and they did. I reached down below the leafage on top and grabbed the area where the earth meets the plant and pulled up a mess of peanuts, all attached to the stalk. Actually, there are others planted, but I haven’t taken the time to pull them up yet. Curiosity got the best of me on this attempt.

I went ahead and pulled up a few carrots while at it. They look good, a variety of sizes.

I spent most of the summer carefully removing black-eyed peas from their holder and awaiting the replacement to grow. I had a pretty good crop of them and have actually planted more, hoping to harvest them before the first frost.

Too, my jalepeno peppers have done exceptionally well this season. Every morning there are about 10 to make it to my sack, a variety of sizes. There are several okra plants in about four of our 11 gardens, many outputting splendidly, a few pods each day. These particular okra plants are not as tall as are usually grown here, but they are extremely healthy.

For sake of tenderness, I try to pick them when the pods are about three to four inches in length. This is sometimes difficult to ascertain, since some mornings I have two-inchers and decide to wait until the next day. When I go back, they are five or six inchers. These crops grow FAST….very FAST! They get tougher the bigger they get, which forms the decision of whether to just let them grow for the seeds when they become gigantic and dry, or to cut them off, since doing so enables new pods faster.

My last post was way back in June, when tomatoes were producing like crazy. I have been too busy to sit down and write a new post, partially because I have been concentrating on creating a new website for Keyhole Farm. Quite simply, I am not the fastest at designing a website from scratch, especially one that picks up and includes all the archival material from the old site, but this post is on that new site. I hope you enjoy looking it over.

In developing the site, I got to read some old posts, like Leon and the Beanstalk, one of my favorites. I also re-posted in the “Extras” tab near the top of the page a short story I wrote entitled The Triffidzoids, sunflowers with a personality.

On the About Us page is a lengthy and detailed repeat of how Keyhole Farm got its start, what inspired us along the way.

It is always a great time to get involved in keyhole gardening. We do offer kits that are fairly easy to install and have proven to be quite durable. Just check them out on the front page of this site.