Every now and then you find a unique wild food that from all practical appearances and applications is not going to ring anyone’s plant bells or create a new food of great magnitude. The hog peanut is a shade loving trifoliate, nitrogen fixing plant hunkered down under the oak trees here at my farm. You don’t even notice it. The populations fluctuate like they have a mind of their own. It’s unpredictable what the outcome will be. Yet dog gone it, why is this little underground bean taste so good yet is so low yielding? What can I do to make this better under cultivation?
Well, for one you cultivate it and give it a good look-see. I ended up growing it just for the flavor and a bit of comic relief. Once a year I can eat a few tubers and spend way too much time on my knees looking for the treasure of hog peanuts. Maybe its funny that people write letters or emails to you to stop growing it as if it is some sort of evil destructive force capable of bringing down whole empires of commercial landscapes sneaking its way into the nitrogen deficient soils. Oh thats right it does that too. That is funny. Then I eat one little tuber and all that negativity goes away. It is just so good. It used to take me hours to find them in their camouflaged skins clinging to the sand particles. Every now I continue my line of seedlings from ‘Crispy Snack’ . Today you can buy seeds of those from Experimental Farm Network. Before I closed my farm, even a few real research scientists expressed interest in the plant and its cultivation. It’s an enigma with a sense of humor.
In 2024, I did a small grow out of just a few plants using the largest tubers I could find from ‘Crispy Snack’. I planted them in a compost and chicken manure infused soil mix in 24 inch by 30 inch landscape fabric bags. I added a cone shaped one inch chicken wire mesh four foot tall as the trellis system to hold the vines up. They easily grew to the top.
Bumblebees are the only pollinators I have seen so far. It takes on average 3-4 years to really hone in on the species attracted to a new flower in abundance.
This spring I am increasing the height by two more feet. This semi-shady location was on the edge of an oak tree and under irrigation. The yields of the actual seeds was very heavy far greater than I anticipated. I never had the thought that seeds themselves might be reason enough to harvest to eat and use even more so than the tubers. When I dug for the tubers, I found the same situation minus one very beautiful and powerful difference. There was one plant that was super clustering in its approach to producing tubers all along the fine root hair system. After carefully extracting the soil around this one plant, I discovered that it was not some genetic difference but instead a form of colonization done by bacteria in the soil which produces the nodules and tubers in the first place. This was something I noticed before when I first dug up the plant more than 30 years ago under a powerline near an American hazelnut bush. This type of tuber or root enhancement is common with the use of the right kind of bacteria in the bean and pea families. With my postulate created, I can now try to innoculate the soil in the spring to see what effect this will have. I will try a couple of widely available kinds used in pea production and maybe the mixtures used in other nitrogen fixers like alfalfa or clover. This could help the plants produce higher yields of tubers and seeds. The seed aspect of it was completely unexpected for me.
I could be on to something. I am not sure what. I will let the hog peanut decide its own outcome. It knows where to go and what to do much more than I do plus it has a sense of humor. That I like and trust.
