The Daily Southerner, Tarboro, NC

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  • Teresa Ellis washes peanuts at Dew's Produce, located at 3773 U.S. Highway 258 South, just south of Tarboro. Some 6,000 acres of the legume were planted in Edgecombe County this year, up from 5,500 in 2011.

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  • Workers pick peanuts Monday morning in Bud Dew's fields. Dew has about 25 acres of peanuts on his family farm.

    WITH JUMP peanuts2.jpg
July 26, 2012

It’s peanut time in Edgecombe

Correspondent Miranda Baines

TARBORO — Some of the hottest days of summer are here and with them the arrival of peanut season in Eastern North Carolina. Unlike some crops, peanuts can take the heat.

“It’s kind of a tough crop. It’ll hang in there,” said local peanut farmer Bud Dew. “It takes the heat and dry conditions a little better than most crops we raise.”

Dew grows peanuts, watermelons, cantaloupes, squash, sweet corn and collards on his family farm and sells them at his roadside stand at 3773 U.S. Highway 158 South, just outside Tarboro.  He said he tries to offer “a little bit of everything” that’s in season. He said this year’s peanut crop was not yielding the same amount as last year’s crop, but now the peanuts are starting to yield better. The mid-season corn crop suffered because of the unusually hot, dry weather but this season’s crop is yielding better, as well. Dew has about 25 acres of peanuts and tending to them and picking them is a full-time job.

“Most of the time we start [picking] around the time it gets light,” said Dew. “We pick every day except Sunday.”

After picking the peanuts, the workers wash them in a giant tub of water and bag them.

“They’re so much better fresh than they are canned,” said Teresa Ellis, a worker at Dew’s Produce. Ellis provided some tips for boiling fresh peanuts.

“Wash ‘em, put ‘em in a deep pot, put ‘em in water, let ‘em soak for about an hour. Soak ‘em in the salt water after you turn the pot off,” said Ellis. She recommended using one cup of salt per 10-pound bag of peanuts.

As Macclesfield farmer Allen Walston says, Eastern North Carolina folks “love boiled peanuts.” Walston sells his Titan, Champs and Suggs varieties of peanuts to local stores and farmers’ markets. He said peanuts that are picked “green” and boiled have a fresher taste than peanuts sold in the grocery store because those peanuts are dried before being sold.

Walston said he has no complaints about the way his peanut crop is faring this season.

“Everything’s looking pretty good,” he said. “It’s been better than it has been in the past couple of years.”

Brandon Sugg of Macclesfield, another local peanut farmer, said he is pleased with his crop. Sugg has six acres of the Sugg variety of peanuts, named after his grandfather, Norfleet Sugg, a well-known Edgecombe County horticulturalist.

”Right now they’re doing pretty good,” said Sugg. “You’ve got to have the rain at the right time and we’ve had it pretty good so far.”

Another place to get fresh peanuts in the county is Benjamin Webb’s roadside stand on Timbers Hall Road, just west of Pinetops.

Peanuts are an important crop in Edgecombe County, said Art Bradley, director of the Edgecombe Center of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service. He said the county has approximately 6,000 acres of peanuts this year, up from about 5,550 last year.

“The price [of peanuts] this year was much better than normal to make up for the shortage last year,” said Bradley. With the peanut harvesting season just beginning, it’s too early to tell what impact this summer’s weather will have on the overall crop yield. Peanuts are harvested in this region through the month of September.

 “We’re hoping to get timely rains and continue to have a moderate season,” said Bradley. Although the current soil moisture is better than usual for July, Bradley said he knows from past experience that eastern North Carolina is “never more than 10 days from a drought” in the summertime.

While the peanut crop is decent thus far this season, other crops haven’t fared as well. Bradley said the July 1 storms ruined a portion of the county’s tobacco crop and cotton is coming in late this year because of rains early in the season.



 

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