You won't see this in Indiana

Today we went for a drive to the east banks of Mobile Bay to Fair Hope, Alabama.  This is a fairly upscale town with several antique shops.  The purpose of the trip was to find a field of peanuts.  Neither Janet nor I in our almost 60 years on this earth have ever seen how they grow peanuts.  I noticed in the Sunday Mobile paper that a county west of Robertsdale, Alabama has harvested some 88 million pounds of peanuts.  Seems unbelievable but that got me to thinking that I have never seen how peanuts are grown.  So Janet and I were on a mission.  In addition to the peanuts we thought we would add some pictures of some things that you weren't likely to ever see in Indiana.


They are burning off the under brush in a wooded area in the park.  The under brush is so thick that they do a controlled burn to prevent a worse fire that isn't planned.  You could actually see this in Indiana but I have never seen it.

 Don't see Piggly Wiggly's up north

The first time I saw a field of cotton I was amazed.  I couldn't imagine trying to pick this by hand.  Today they use combines that pick it and pack it into very large cotton bales that you see sitting on the side of the road until they are picked up later.

This is one of the big cotton bales

 Here is a shot of a cotton combine.  Kind of looks like a miniature corn combine.

You ever heard the song by Brooks and Dunn called Red Dirt Road.  We showed one of these roads two years ago and here's another one.

You don't have to go far to get your oranges if you live here.

This field is full of sweet potatoes.  They may grow them in Indiana but I have never seen it.

These next two pictures are of downtown Fairhope.  The flowers and trees were beautiful.

This is a close up of the Mobile Alabama skyline from across Mobile Bay using the zoom on our Nikon camera.  The next picture is using the normal magnification where you don't see any buildings.

Neat tree with carvings at the end of the limbs at the Fairhope yacht club.

A picture of Mobile Bay.

Where you don't see cotton or peanuts you see a lot of Pecan groves.

Let's hope Charlie is a hell of a lot better barber than he is a speller.

And finally the whole reason for today's trip is shown in the last three pictures.  I was beginning to wonder if we would get to see any fields of peanuts since it appeared most had already been picked.  The person in the camp site across from us is a farmer from northern Alabama and he used to grow peanuts years ago.  He said the first thing you do to harvest them is to run an inverter through the field which turns the peanuts under ground over so they are exposed.  The peanuts are then picked and the green plant is used for feeding live stock.

This is me pulling up some of the plants to be sure we were looking at a peanut field.