I’ve been growing peanuts for four seasons now. The 2025-2026 season was one of the worst.
The prior season had been an absolute cracker. I made boiled peanuts, two jars of peanut butter, and even had enough seed to sell so others could grow peanuts too.
Last year, we’d had both ideal growing conditions in terms of rain and temperature; and I had been an ideal gardener, mounding and mulching when I was supposed to for a maximum crop.
But this year, I have to take the blame for the poor performance. This was all my fault.
Positioning
This year I planted my peanuts beneath a large swan plant/milkweed, and this turned out to be my biggest mistake. Last week I told you how doing so almost made me go blind, but it also affected the performance of the peanuts themselves.
That swan plant had set a lot of seed in the 6 months prior to planting my peanuts, and a lot of that seed fell close to the mother plant.
So as my peanuts grew, so did about a million swan plants around and between them.
The peanuts were netted to prevent our feral chickens from digging them up, but that net was my nemesis.
Procrastination
Over the Christmas break, I knew I needed to weed my peanuts, then mound and mulch them. It was on my to-do list for weeks. And it never got done.
I didn’t want to lift the stupid net, I didn’t want to pull out all the weeds, and I didn’t want to do to all that work while I was on my summer break.
So… I didn’t. And then it felt like it was too late. Ultimately, I think the mounding and mulching (not to mention a little weeding) really makes a difference.
Poor companions
I also suspect that milkweed just makes a really poor companion for peanuts. They compete for space, and light. And the milkweed is always going to win that fight because it’s a taller, faster-growing plant.
But aside from that obvious problem, I just… don’t think they like each other.
The swan plants growing near the peanuts didn’t grow as well as the swan plants in other parts of the garden. And the peanuts directly below the mother swan plant didn’t do as well as the ones growing further away from it.
It suggests there’s some kind of interaction that hinders both plants.
Harvest results
After making smoked paprika, I couldn’t get the idea of boiled peanuts with smoked paprika out of my head. So that was the main motivation for harvesting at all.
There was some significant rain forecast so I decided to go ahead and just pull them up. Having lost much of my peanut crops to a poorly-timed harvest in the second year I grew them, I’ve made a point of getting in before heavy rains in late March-April.
Most of the plants had at least some nuts on them, but they were significantly smaller than last year’s plants. This year’s best plants were roughly equal to last year’s poor-average ones.
Seed plants drying on the drying rack.
Still, some had developed large enough nuts in numbers great enough to qualify as seed plants for next year.
And once I took the rest of the nuts off the other plants, there was enough for a batch of smoked paprika boiled peanuts.
Going forward
I’ve got enough seed for me, but I don’t think I have enough to sell this year, which is a little disappointing. I sold out of peanut seed last year, and I’d have liked to have done that again this year.
Next year, I’m going to make the effort to weed, mound, and mulch my plants. I’m 100% confident that this care results in better plants and more peanuts.
Growing my own peanuts to season with my own homegrown, home-smoked paprika turned out to be a marvellous idea. It honestly made me so happy to sit in bed munching boiled peanuts while watching 90’s music videos last week.
I’m not sure it would have been worth losing my sight for, and I wish I’d done a bunch of stuff differently, but it wasn’t without its reward.
Swings and roundabouts huh? It wasn’t a total failure, but I’ve definitely had better years.
