When Is the Best Time to Harvest Peanuts? A Full Guide to Seed-Saving Techniques

Mastering the right harvest time for peanuts is hugely important for improving peanut yield and quality. While harvesting peanuts, be sure to select and keep good seeds to ensure a bumper peanut harvest next year. Here is an introduction to the right harvest time and seed-saving techniques for peanuts:

1. Timely harvest. Because peanuts are a crop that flowers above ground and sets fruit below ground, it is generally very hard to tell from the outside whether the pods are already plump and ripe. Peanuts also flower continuously and set pods continuously, so the pods do not ripen uniformly. Harvesting too early or too late will affect both yield and quality. Therefore, determining the right harvest time for peanuts is especially important. In general, the right harvest time for peanuts can be judged from the following three aspects.

1. Look at the growth period. The growth period of common peanut varieties is about 125 days.

2. Look at the temperature. If the average day and night temperature is below 12°C, the peanuts have stopped growing and can be harvested.

3. Look at the plant. Under normal conditions, once peanuts enter the late podding stage, most of the nutrients in the plant have already been transported to the pods; the plant shows signs of aging, the tips stop growing, the upper leaves turn yellow, and the lower and middle leaves drop. At this point most pods have plump kernels and can be harvested.

2. Seed-saving techniques. When selecting seeds to keep, pay special attention: choose pods from plants that have the characteristics of the variety, ripen uniformly, have neat branching, and set fruit in a concentrated and plump manner, and use these pods as seeds. Pods set by plants with the following symptoms must not be used as seed.

1. Plants that stay green and ripen late. Such plants develop poorly early on and then grow excessively later; not only do they set fruit later, they also set fewer fruit and have poorer plumpness.

2. Plants that weaken too early. The peanut pods are not yet ripe, but the above-ground plant declines too early; the organic matter accumulated in the kernels is not yet sufficient. Using them as seed not only gives a low germination rate but also causes them to lose the characteristics of the variety, weakening year by year and directly affecting yield.

3. Diseased plants. Pods set by plants suffering from wilt disease, leaf spot disease, or peanut rust, if used as seed, will not only spread and transmit the disease but are also mostly empty pods and shriveled seeds.