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HARVESTING PEANUTS, MARIANNA,
ARKANSAS

Lat. 35° N.; Long. 91° W.

The "peanut man" with his little push cart is one of the common sights in any great city. Did you ever ask yourself when you bought a bag of his nuts, where they came from? Or how they grew? All the man with the push cart does is to roast the raw nuts.

Peanuts, as the name suggests, are vegetables that look and taste like nuts, and that grow in pods like peas. The nuts are not picked from bushes as you might think, but they grow underground like potatoes. It is a tropical and semi-tropical plant. It is said to be a native of Brazil. Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, and other southern states produce great quantities.

It is interesting to learn how they grow. The raw nuts are planted in hills or in furrows, and they are plowed and hoed just as other vegetables are. When the vines grow a few inches

tall they have small, yellow flowers. These flowers fall off, and stems come out where the flowers were. The stems grow into the ground. On the end of each of these stems begins to grow the pod that afterwards contains the peanuts. In the fall of the year, vines and stems are dug up and stacked in piles to dry. After several days the nuts are picked from the vines, cleaned in fanning mills, and put in heavy burlap bags for shipment.

Here you see a crowd of workmen with a plantation owner in the foreground. These workmen have been digging peanuts. *How tall do you think the vines grow above the ground?* Beyond the workman on the right you see a stack of peanuts and peanut vines around a pole. This is a favorite way of building the stacks because it allows the air to pass freely through the vines.

Copyright by The Watson View Company.

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