It is about time for the groundnuts/peanuts to blossom. Do you prefer calling these groundnuts or peanuts?
So yesterday I spotted these flowers below the groundnut plants. This is the first flowering phase that often takes place whenever groundnuts are about a month old.
The second flowering stage often happens later in the growth of the groundnuts signalling that the nuts are boooming and maturing beneath the leaves.
It doesn't take so much stress to grow groundnuts and for now the only difficult task is when you have to cultivate or carry out tillage on the land. Unlike the corn plant where you can decide to plant the corn directly on the ground without any form of tillage like some people did, it is a must to till the land before planting groundnuts. The reason for this is not far fetch, groundnuts like a few other legume are root bearing plant. They bear their fruits in the root hence the roots have to be well covered up in enough soil for their foods to grow. Moreover the sands on the roots have to be equally soft and well broken which only happens during tillage or cultivation of the land.
As soon as the peanuts is cultivated and in maximum 5months time from when they were planted, the nuts will have been riped and ready for harvest.
And like I said earlier that there is less of a difficulty growing groundnuts especially this year, you can see that the farm is still very much neat even after a month of cultivation of the land and planting of the nuts.
If it was in previous years, we would have been carrying out a first weeding exercise on the farm by now. Grasses would have germinated and grown alongside the crops to hinder it's growth.
The methods we used now is to spray some herbicide right after cultivating the land a d before planting any seeds. The grasses are kept at bay while the crops germinate and grow. Before newer grasses will come out to interfere with the growth of the plant the nuts will have grown far and above their reach, then we can now carry out a weeding exercise just once before harvest. Herbicides have been very useful for our farming task but one must ensure that they use it properly, the right concentration that will not affect the crops and our land or what will not have an adverse effect on humans as well.
