Latest / Hydroponics Daily / Hydroponic Peanuts: Can We Grow Them Without Soil?

Transcript

Hydroponic Peanuts: Can We Grow Them Without Soil? · Hydroponics Daily

• 0:00
  Hello there and welcome back to
• 0:01
  Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
• 0:06
  I'm your host Dr Russell Sharp and on yesterday's podcast I said that I was
• 0:11
  going to do a podcast all about growing peanuts hydroponically.
• 0:14
  I wasn't sure whether this had been done before but now I've done some research
• 0:17
  and I found that it has been done experimentally but not commercially.
• 0:23
  So there have been a number of studies looking at peanut cultivation and let's
• 0:28
  have a look at them so peanuts scientific name arachis hypergaea they're a legume
• 0:35
  so they their roots fix nitrogen though the bacteria do in the root nodules,
• 0:41
  and they have the same pea-like flower but
• 0:44
  unusually the once pollinated they then form the the what then becomes the fruit
• 0:52
  it buries down into the soil and develops into what we now know as the peanut
• 0:59
  or what we commonly refer to as the peanut so peanuts have been grown in.
• 1:05
  Recirculatory hydroponic systems by nasa we've talked about before and they've
• 1:10
  looked at growth yield humidity co2 and they've optimized them and then other
• 1:15
  researchers have looked at nutrient film technique and deep water culture using
• 1:21
  specialist trays designed to let the pegs,
• 1:24
  and these are the developing fruits or the gynophores,
• 1:28
  grow down into a moist zone for pod formation.
• 1:31
  Now this is important because the life cycle of the peanut relies on,
• 1:36
  Well, about 35 days after planting, they start to flower.
• 1:42
  Then after pollination, after about 60 days after planting, the fruit,
• 1:47
  so the developing fruit, bends down and forms what's called a peg.
• 1:52
  And the peg burrows into the ground.
• 1:55
  And the tip of the peg takes in water and nutrients from the soil as well as the plant.
• 2:01
  And that's probably one of only a handful of plants that do that.
• 2:05
  I don't know of any other plants that do that.
• 2:06
  So the pod then expands to full size and the peanut develops inside.
• 2:12
  And then after 100 days, they can be harvested for boiling. A lot of them are boiled.
• 2:21
  120 to 150 days after planting, full seed maturity is reached.
• 2:26
  So the matured seeds can be planted to begin the cycle again.
• 2:30
  So after 100 days, you can harvest it and eat it. after 120
• 2:33
  to 150 days you can you can get
• 2:36
  the the seeds that can be used for
• 2:39
  the life cycle so he said that the the peg absorbs
• 2:43
  moisture and nutrients especially calcium directly
• 2:46
  from the soil so the pegging phase is
• 2:50
  very important and so dwc seems
• 2:53
  to be good at this because they can or even putting
• 2:56
  the developing pegs into special trays alongside the the
• 3:01
  the main roots is at one
• 3:04
  potential way of doing it the pods
• 3:07
  and mature seeds have been successfully produced directly in dark and
• 3:10
  aerated nutrient solution given adequate calcium and
• 3:13
  aeration so you could you need a separate you
• 3:16
  could have potentially a separate nutrient solution for the pods which gets
• 3:21
  rather complicated doesn't it having those but if you can think of a good reason
• 3:26
  why your hydroponic peanuts be better than soil-grown ones then potentially
• 3:31
  there's a market and some unique ip around that,
• 3:35
  They've been used to study rooting systems and nutrient toxicity,
• 3:41
  such as cadmium and aluminium, so they've been used as almost like a model plant species.
• 3:49
  NASA's work was on root, tuber, and nut crop.
• 3:53
  Crops explicitly included peanuts as one of the candidate foods for space life support systems,
• 3:59
  so potentially they were
• 4:01
  looking at whether astronauts and mars colonizers
• 4:05
  could eat peanuts so there's no evidence of
• 4:08
  any large-scale commercial peanut production in greenhouses
• 4:11
  compared to lettuce tomatoes strawberries those sorts of standard crops at least
• 4:15
  one peanut company is reportedly investigating hydroponics or aero farming with
• 4:22
  polytunnel research but there's not a lot of information on that agri-crops
• 4:26
  is that one and then obviously the,
• 4:29
  there's people on reddit as there always are with any
• 4:32
  crop growing it and reporting back but not
• 4:35
  so very much diy amateur side of
• 4:38
  things so an interesting one pegging or gyna falls as it were one of the potential
• 4:45
  benefits of hydroponics as always with hydroponics is the massive water saving
• 4:50
  you can get compared to soil ground crops you know you're talking 80 90 water.
• 4:56
  Saving and with peanuts this is
• 4:59
  potentially even more because you're the
• 5:02
  peanuts are absorbing water from the hydroponic system so there's
• 5:05
  a double saving there and then obviously
• 5:08
  when you harvest peanuts normally you have
• 5:11
  to pull the plants out of the ground and then wash them if they're
• 5:15
  going to be used for human consumption and so that will
• 5:19
  mean that they that when they're washed the vast
• 5:22
  amounts of dirty water are created which
• 5:24
  is a massive issue because it loses water and it also loses soil
• 5:27
  so you could potentially grow clean peanuts hydroponically
• 5:31
  which could be a tipping factor in commercializing
• 5:35
  it so it sounds crazy doesn't it sounds like one of these ones
• 5:38
  where it would be the last crop you would ever consider because it's
• 5:41
  so complicated with these pegs going in
• 5:44
  that and the developing fruit but if you
• 5:47
  can save serious serious amounts of water then it
• 5:50
  could be a good crop as water becomes more limiting so an interesting one there
• 5:55
  so there are a number of different studies there there's sort of semi hydroponic
• 6:00
  systems as well if you go on youtube there's people doing it in like cocoa and
• 6:04
  things like this but for pure hydroponics then um.
• 6:08
  DWC and NFT seems to work. And what else was it?
• 6:13
  Yeah, they said that you basically don't need to, it's one of these NFT systems
• 6:16
  where you don't need to grow media.
• 6:17
  I might talk about that tomorrow, whether, you know, some NFTs,
• 6:20
  you just have the small plug the plant is planted into, and then they go into
• 6:24
  the nutrient solution and the root systems can grow really well.
• 6:28
  Whereas other crops, you actually have to have like a rockwell grow media.
• 6:33
  So we'll talk about whether you should use a grow meter
• 6:36
  at all in tomorrow's podcast probably
• 6:39
  so short one today peanuts or as
• 6:43
  it's scientifically known was it arachis hypogeia
• 6:46
  i don't know what that means and then the pegs the word
• 6:49
  of the day is gynophores it's not
• 6:52
  going to be pegging it's going to be gynophores all right
• 6:55
  that's been hydroponics daily for today if you found this at all
• 6:58
  useful maybe you're a peanut farmer who's trying
• 7:01
  to get into hydroponics please leave us an apple podcast review
• 7:04
  it helps the podcast tremendously if you're
• 7:06
  not listening on apple don't bother leaving a review it's a
• 7:09
  waste of time just make sure you follow us to hear more
• 7:12
  exciting episodes every day of 2025 and check
• 7:15
  out utreema.co.uk if you're interested
• 7:19
  in growing peanuts hydroponically please get in touch and we'll make a bespoke
• 7:23
  fertilizer for you i don't offer that to everyone um but i'm really interested
• 7:27
  in growing legumes hydroponically i can't be bothered to do it myself but if
• 7:30
  somebody else wants to do it i'll make you a fertilizer and we can experiment
• 7:33
  with what's the best one the best formulation for it because there's no real
• 7:37
  work that's been done on that i think,
• 7:39
  of any notes so that's been hand upon it daily for today i'll see you again tomorrow goodbye.