This is the second installment in a two-part series looking at an “average” small-operations farm in Allen County. Earlier this month an article highlighted the Covey family’s system of farm-to-table poultry. Today, peanuts.
TENNESSEE RED VALENCIA (Arachis hypogaea): aka, Gilbert’s Goobers
Gilbert Covey holds a peanut shell up to his ear and shakes it. Rattle. “Hear it?” He shakes it again. Rattle. He shakes it one more time. “Hear it? That’s how you know it’s ready. That means they’re dry.”
It’s been a long time, about 10 years, since Covey last cultivated a small crop of peanut plants. It’s an unusual crop for the area. Most of the billions of pounds of peanuts that make it to U.S. markets each year are grown in the American South, with about half of those coming from Georgia.
“Peanuts originally come from Brazil,” explains Covey. “The United States got them back in the 1700s, so they’ve been here a while. But they’re just not grown much around here, not that I know of.”
Covey is holding a peanut plant he’s recently exhumed from his garden. The branches are heavy with their particular fruits. Covey plucks a single wrinkled shell from a vine.
“These are Tennessee Red Valencia,” he explains. He opens the shell, revealing three healthy-looking peanuts, each coated in a papery, richly-tinted red skin. “You can see here how they got their name,” says Covey. Because they look like they’re from Tennessee? “Because of their color. Here, taste one.”
Covey explains that peanuts, like the soybeans that crowd the fields around his rural Elsmore farm, are actually legumes, not nuts. “That mainly means they produce their own nitrogen for the plant. And these here are what you call heirloom peanuts. Now, an heirloom is open-pollinated, so you can go ahead and keep your seed and plant it next year.
“You know,” says the overmodest Covey, “they’re actually pretty easy to grow.”
HERE, then, is that process in a nutshell (sorry): Covey orders a quarter-pound package of starter peanuts from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in central Virginia. Once they arrive, he breaks open the shells and retrieves the peanuts. He plants each seed in a six-inch pot and keeps them in his greenhouse until each plant is sturdy enough to withstand the elements outdoors. When they reach a durable size — about five or six inches — Covey moves the plants to his garden. This is usually around the middle of April, once the frost has gone.
“They’re slow-starters,” says Covey. “Meaning, it might be that for almost a month you can’t hardly see that they’ve grown. In fact, I was beginning to wonder about them. But then, all of a sudden, here they go.”
After flowering, the thigh-high plant generates a number of long tendrils that curve toward the ground. Shoot-like “pegs” then branch off from the tips of these tendrils and dive into the soil. In time, with the absorption of water and nutrients, a peanut shell forms at the end of each peg.
During this final phase, Covey and his grown son, Andrew — “I don’t know what I’d do without him,” Covey says of his only son — “we cover the peanuts with an extra layer of dirt. … I watched my own dad use this method when I was a child,” says Covey. “See, my dad raised a few peanuts and that’s what he did, and it worked. Almost 60 years ago.”
Last week Covey began the process of digging up the mature plants. “You pull the whole thing up and let them dry.” Covey strung pieces of rope from one end of his greenhouse to the other and is letting the peanut-heavy plants hang upside down in the warmth of that building until they’re ready to be culled.
Once they’re dry — once each shell gives off its natural rattle — Covey and Andrew will handpick each pod.
“This year, I’m going to try something that a friend of mine told me about,” says Covey. “He said to soak them in saltwater. He didn’t know for sure how long. That way you kind of get the salt into the peanut, because it goes through the shell. And my wife, Diana? She’ll put them in the oven and roast them.”
PIGS, ONIONS, DEATH, SAUERKRAUT, EARTHQUAKES AND SUCH
“The philosopher’s stone of an American farmer is to do everything within his own family, to trouble his neighbors by borrowing as little as possible, and to abstain from buying European commodities. He that follows that golden rule and has a good wife is almost sure of succeeding.”*
— J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, “Thoughts of an American Farmer on Various Rural Subjects” (c. 1782)
“Hey, did you feel that earthquake we had here awhile back?” asks Covey, referring to the recent shiver that ran through southeast Kansas, a result of the wastewater injection wells that are roiling the oil fields of northern Oklahoma. “We sure did. That’s the first one I’ve ever felt. Matter of fact, a couple of jars of sauerkraut that my wife had canned fell off the shelf.”
Covey gives his wife, a medication aide at Windsor Place in Iola, a huge share of the credit for the success of their small farm. “Even after a long day at work, she comes home and works. I try to help her as much as I’m able.”
The two have been married nearly 40 years. Diana Covey, who comes from Fort Scott originally, has a quick wit and an easy smile and is someone who, even in conversation, remains constantly at work with her hands.
“We had a beautiful garden this year,” says Diana, while cleaning chicken after chicken at a sink in one of the farm’s many outbuildings.
“It was the best garden year I’ve had,” says Covey. “Everything we raised was great. The only thing left out there are our sweet potatoes.”
“We canned about everything else,” says Diana. “I’ve got dill pickles, kosher dill pickles, stewed tomatoes and spaghetti sauce — what else? I can’t think right off. Corn.”
“Sauerkraut,” adds Covey.
“Sauerkraut,” sighs Diana, “now, that’s a challenge.”
“We made that ourselves,” says Covey. “From cabbage. And it’s good, too.”
“Oh, and our carrots were great this year,” says Diana. “We had lots of carrots.”
“And the zucchini,” says Covey. “Oh my gosh — they didn’t quit.”
“Oh, no they didn’t,” agrees Diana. “We’ve got zucchini in the freezers. If something goes wrong with the world,” she jokes, looking over the top of her glasses, “we’re safe.”
LATER, Covey will open the door onto one of the small sheds on his property. Two long tables fill the room. They are crowded with huge, beautiful onions. Row after row, they resemble, with their glossy white-green flesh just visible through delicate golden jackets, a display of expensive ornaments.
In the same shed, by the door, there are large sacks of popcorn kernels. “One year I raised 2,100 pounds of shelled popcorn.” Outside the shed, Covey points to a chain-link pen. “There are our little hens where we get eggs. And there,” says Covey, pointing to a deteriorating structure in the shadow of his old barn, “I used to raise a lot of hogs, too, and that’s an old ferring house. When the sows would have pigs, I’d put them in there, and raise them from babies until they were fat and ready to go to market. I even had goats. And I had cattle for the pastures.”
Across his 68 years, Gilbert Covey has held a regular parade of jobs. He’s been an Army man, car salesman, gas station manager, school custodian, bus driver. But he was always, above all else, a farmer. In his heyday, he tilled more than a thousand acres. And though now retired from the workaday world, and down to 160 acres on the farm, Covey hasn’t shown an abundant interest in just kicking back. As he says, he’s a farmer.
He was born on a farm — about a mile and a half from his current patch — and intends, when it’s his turn, to die that way.
“That’s the way my dad was, he ended his life on the farm. My brother and sister-in-law was taking care of him after my mom passed away. The same for me, you see. This is where I want to be. I don’t care what age I go,” says Covey, who has diabetes and is only a few years out from a triple bypass. “I know the good Lord’s looking after me and when it’s my time — OK. But this, here, right here, is it. You see?”
Covey’s cellphone rings. He apologizes before taking the call. After hanging up, he says:
“Oh, wait. I didn’t tell you this. I used to raise sunflowers, too. Oh sure, 200 to 250 acres of sunflowers. Those are the most beautiful things. I don’t know if there’s any even growing around here anymore. The good thing about those sunflowers, I loved it because every morning they’re facing the sun and then they turn and end up over here at night. But yet by morning they turn back and they’re ready to go again. Isn’t that incredible? You’ve probably seen them do that.”
Covey glances back at his phone. “What’s this say?” He mumbles to himself: “It says ‘swipe down to’…something. I can’t tell, I don’t know.” He puts the phone back on his clip. “Anyway, I really enjoy all of this. Out here. I really, really do.”
*Used as the epigraph to Richard Rhodes’ 1989 book “Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer.”
