Monday, November 21, 2011
Doggy humor: The peanut harvest
4:56 PM | 
Posted by
Bruny Hudson |
By Hobo Hudson
When I trotted out this morning, I found Charlene, my squirrel sharecropper, in her peanut farm carefully digging and looking at the peanuts. She turned toward me and said, “Well, Hobo, it looks like it’s time to harvest. Most of the peanuts are fully developed, and if we leave them in the ground much longer, they’ll begin to rot or sprout.”
I ran back inside the house and barked at Dad and Thomas, my new kitty brother, to come help, Dad to dig the peanuts and Charlene to pull them off the roots and throw them to Thomas who would separate them into two equal piles. One pile for me and one pile for Charlene.
All three followed my instructions, and the work started out to run smoothly, but Charlene soon complained that Thomas was putting the biggest peanuts in my pile. I looked and didn’t really see any difference but decided to pacify her by raking all the peanuts into a new pile and decreeing that Thomas would sort the peanuts into two piles and Charlene would have her pick of whichever pile she wanted. This solution seemed to work out well and, after hours of hard manual labor, the peanuts were all harvested, and Charlene had selected the pile she wanted, and I was happy with the other pile.
I looked at the huge pile of peanuts I had for my half and wondered how I got so many when Charlene had only planted one peanut. Out of curiosity, I asked her about it. She just sniffed and said her family had been growing peanuts for thousands of years and had even given advice to humans who never mentioned her or an ancestor when they wrote articles and stories about peanuts and peanut farming. They just took credit as though they had thought everything up themselves.
She said her ancestors are still complaining about sharing their peanut knowledge with a guy named Gregor Mendel in Austria
Charlene then went on to chitter about another ancestor helping out a guy named George Washington Carver. He knew to plant the best peanuts but, when they were harvested, he wanted to feed them to his pigs to make them grow faster.
Charlene’s ancestor, hearing about it, explained to Mr. Carver how nutritious the peanuts were and showed him how to mash them up between two rocks to make peanut butter. She also told him that it would taste a lot better if he would roast the peanuts before mashing them, but she seldom had a source of fire and had to make her peanut butter from raw peanuts. Mr. Carver got right on it and found she was right. He then published several papers about “his” new process and didn’t even mention her in any of the articles.
Since Charlene’s ancestors had gotten a raw deal when they shared their knowledge, I have decided to dedicate this paper to Charlene and all the squirrels everywhere who have contributed to the hooman knowledge of peanut farming and the peanut’s nutritional value.
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