It is finally time to harvest our very own groundnuts and the work has begun gradually. Groundnut harvest is a very slow process of uprooting the Groundnuts plants first before we finally sit down to pluck off the fresh groundnuts seeds from the plant.
Due to the nature of this work, we often invite our friends to join and assist us for harvest the very same way we often join them in their own harvest as well.
For this weekend when we gradually began harvest we were alone in the farm with no assistance, one or two person that ought to join us are down with fever and flu, as the weather is changing so is our health adjusting to the pattern, before today I also caught a flu and some fever which I treated almost immediately to avoid breaking down that can take me off work for health reasons.
To start the harvest we pulled up some of the plant roots to be sure that the groundnuts are truly ripe and ready for harvest. We have checked this about 2weeks before now but the abundance of rains makes the seeds to continue being immature and not too strong now that the rains are gone, they have hardened up much more and ready for harvest. Harvest may last for about two weeks depending on if we get assistance to speed up the process.
The Groundnuts are fresh and can be boiled and eating like this even without boiling one can still eat these freshly harvested groundnuts. But right after harvest begins the preservation process. We have to sub dry these for days to remove the moisture content from seeds so that they can be stored. Once the seeds within becomes dried, they can no longer be boiled for eating and for such another processing methods is used for cooking the seeds either by roasting or other process for it to be eating
We were able to harvest and pluck off some groundnuts before the sun became hot and unbearable to work with. This is the first day of harvest and the process will be continuous until we harvest all our nuts.
